Chapter 21 - Sewerside
Cicero, The Wooden Indian Inn--August, 8th, 2018
Gaius Cassius Longinus was restless, growing uneasy with going over the maps again and again in the cramped little space he rented on the top floor in a falling down hovel on the edge of the city. What had started as a hunt for a blood-thirsty coven in Europe had ended in slaying of the wolf-thing Sköll, a happenstance encounter that, rather than tying up a loose end to decades’ old defeat, raised troubling questions in the witch-hunter’s sleepless mind.
The beast had attempted to go to ground during its flight, failing to dislodge a manhole cover in its attempt to seek refuge from the Inquisitor. It could have been a moment of panic or a sincere attempt at returning to its lair. Longinus assumed the latter.
Ancient undergrounds were not unknown to Longinus, of course. It was an ancient urban legacy to have great cities rebuild upon themselves. It had been so since before the time of Christ. Longinus had hunted horrors in many of the more famous warrens from antiquity. Roman catacombs and Parisian sewers and Middle-Eastern aqua-ducts were often the haunts of the Lost and the Damned.
Chicago’s Sewerside was unique, however. Infamous.
Sprawling out in tunnels and trails from the heart of the city, Sewerside was a deep and labyrinthine underworld that mixed the old and new in a secret environment beneath the metropolitan sun of the conspicuous Chicago above. As her skyline reached up into the bright heavens, her underground dove deep into darkness.
Rail beds beneath her streets once served the power needs of the great city. Cars once delivered coal and carried away the spent ashen remains that fueled her progress. A hidden freight line, intended to secret goods from her ports, was dug under the city’s nose, in an attempt to create a transit system that would make delivery across town a speedy venture that topside would take hours in her crowded and sluggish streets.
Now, those same tunnels ran conduit and drain lines, allowing her to breathe easier.
The system often flooded. In the late ‘60s the Deep Tunnel Project created an extensive underground drainage system to alleviate this problem, and more and greater tunnels were excavated.
There was a whole wide world underneath Chicago’s sidewalks and motorways and they all connected in a maze beneath her foundations. Sewerside was a world that the lost and abandoned of humanity called home.
Longinus had gone to the city records and reproduced copies of maps charting this extensive network. Attempting to map out a path to Mogilnekov’s warehouse had been his goal, but the records were conflicting, incomplete, confusing, or a combination of all three. After three days with tracing paper, he was still unable to find a direct route to follow.
The witch-hunter only ventured out to purchase the meager supplies he lived on--bread, cheese, water (he wouldn’t dare drink from the tap in his flop), apples, grapes, an occasional orange--an indulgence he still considered a delicacy. He kept up the pretense of the quiet tenant to avoid arousing suspicion with his stay, but for the most part he needed little sustenance. He could consume food, but rarely needed it, a consequence of his blessing. Or his curse. He was never really sure which it was and often, on the occasions he imbibed wine, would debate his predicament to the Lord. But always, his heart would lead him to a place of solace. It was his cross to bear, and mostly he bore it with determination and resolve.
The world had changed for the Inquisitor, as it always did, in ways he’d hoped it never would but long feared. His enemies were always on the move, defeated but never destroyed. He resisted the sense of urgency to tap into channels he felt were borderline blasphemies, but failed. Human meddling had made the unthinkable a necessity. His encounter at Strobilus had made that threat all too real. For a man doomed to live, he was often forced to change his tactics to face the evil all about humanity. And, as more often than not, it was humanity that drove him to make dire alterations. It was with dogged persistence that he remained on task, though each passing year he grew more and further estranged from his connection with Mankind. It was not his faith in God that faltered, but faith in Man. For all his efforts, he struggled with the creeping sensation that his cause was all but lost.
Now, he changed his operations to directly include the fallen demon Adrammaloch to his order. Nomad was an active agent in the Ordo Malleus Dei. The link the two shared was a psychic bond, and he frequently exercised his connection to the demon. He’d encouraged him, in fact; used him, to gain access to the world of the supra-sapien threats, driving Nomad to establish a covert appointment under an alias to engage that world purposefully. As an employee in the sanctioned role of a U.S. supra, Nomad worked for the OMD in a clandestine effort to keep tabs on the undercurrent of affairs in the realm kept secret to the world-at-large. That activity was growing, much to Longinus’ dismay. And what was more; the enemy was aware of his role in the affair and aimed to remove him from play. With his liberation from incarceration, Longinus knew he could no longer keep the demon bound to tertiary roles of research and reflection.
Now, Nomad was investigating a troubling disturbance in Ohio that didn’t seem directly related to the events unfolding in Chicago, but as these evolved, they almost always shared some horrific common ground. There always seemed to be a connection. The fires of Hell were stoked from many irons.
Still, the witch-hunter worried. Longinus knew too well the consequences of delving too deep into the powers of the other side to further his goals, however righteous the intentions. That path was consuming and seductive and wrought with peril.
There had been a time in his long past, where Longinus had reveled in his fortune. He had allowed himself to see his place, not as an instrument of the Lord’s Will, but of his own. In a dark age under a dark mentor, he took it upon himself to engage in the affairs of humanity with forthright conviction and grim purpose. His mind clouded by the machinations of a witch called Merddyn, he became the hope of a people fighting against the oppression of the enemy, or so he was poisoned to believe. He cast himself into the role of self-appointed king and his pride was their ruin. And as a man called Arthur, he managed to find the limitations of his so-called power at the expense of the only woman he ever claimed to love.
Guinevere. Held in the deep of Hell, she was the victim of a Luciferian pact that tormented the witch-hunter. Though he could find his way to the abyss, a curse robbed him of his memories when he set foot in that God forsaken place, dooming him to wander the unholy reaches aimlessly until he found his way back to the world again and the restoration of his mind. Each time he would emerge he was reminded again and again of his sorrowful plight and his helplessness at retrieving that which seemed utterly lost to him.
Now, as in times past, when his mind was reeling from the next actions to take to serve his true master, he would falter, and find himself in the lethargic reminiscence of those long gone days. He would remember the scent and touch of a woman. Remember the betrayal of a people he destroyed.
In exasperation bent on depression, and praying for deliverance, he decided his best course was to wander into the dark below and take his chances. It was, he had finally determined, the most forthright manner in which his call to the Lord would be answered. Take up arms and make one’s own way and let His will be done.
At nightfall on the third day, Gaius Cassius Longinus descended into Sewerside via an open storm grate behind the horrible little inn he called home.
#
“Don’t let it hit the muck, mate,” the man clad in black Kevlar grunted to his equally dark-clad associate. The two men looked like insects, their heads wrapped in infrared goggles.
The two men wrangled a silver tube, approximately eight feet long and four feet wide, two feet tall, hanging at the end of a block-and-tackle rig. They carefully lowered it in an upright position, through a round, brick-laden shaft of masonry set in place over a hundred years before.
Below them ran a culvert flowing a slow, steady stream of sewer run off. Waiting for them was a fat-tire gurney with a series of furniture straps and hand-crank come-alongs.
One of the insect-men jumped into the run-off with a splash, followed by a series of expletives. He pulled the tube into the sewer, pushing it into alignment with the gurney.
“Where the hell is the croc?” the man standing in the sewage harshly whispered, kicking offal from his black boots.
“You’re not in Australia,” the Frenchman said, hanging from above in the tunnel.
“What?”
“He’s a gator, not a croc.”
“Whatever eff he is,” the Aussie said frustrated, “Where the hell is he?”
“Probably chasing rats. Look, he got us here, let him be. One less than thing to deal with later.”
“Slack,” the Australian said, and his teammate above let out more steel cording, allowing the big tube to come to rest on the guides of the wheeled cart.
“That’s got it. Good on ya, froggie,” said the man in the muck. His partner answered in expletives, rapid-fire, in French.
“No worries,” the Aussie waved his partner off. “The Shelia is gonna love this.”
“My guess is she’s gonna be disappointed,” a voice from the shadows boomed.
The two insect-men froze. Though they had never met the man behind the voice, they knew him by reputation. He appeared as they suspected, wrapped in a similar Kevlar reinforced jumpsuit surrounded by bandoliers of ammunition pouches, combat knives, climbing gear, at least two automatic pistols, and clutching an Israeli-made AK-47 with IR sights, its barrel trained in the two men’s direction. A similar IR rig sat atop this man’s face. Gray stubble--what was left of his hair on his balding pate--stuck out through the straps on his goggles. Except for the hair, it was exactly how they would have guessed The Witness would appear.
The three stood in silence.
The Witness was one of the more infamous vigilantes in Chicago. Rumor was he was a former mob hit-man who turned federal stool-pigeon. When his family was killed in retribution before he could testify, he went rogue. He went crazy. A dozen murders followed, all known associates of the Gigliani family. All known associates of Vincenzo “The Fly” Mosca.
Vincenzo Mosca had killed a made-man in the Gigliani crew--Peter “Rope” Ferenza. He turned “rat” after this unintended error drove him to desperation, but the federal protection ordered for him failed to save his family. The hit, it was assumed, had been arranged from inside the WPA. Finding himself alone, Mosca went on a rampage. By the time he was through, he had nothing left. For whatever reasons after that, Vincenzo Mosca became The Witness.
A conduit trailing out of the brick well’s opening made a ninety degree turn and ran along the ceiling of the adjacent sewer line. The Witness had a pry bar jammed underneath the aluminum tubing that he now, without taking his eyes off the two men and the silver tube, yanked with one great effort. High above in the well shaft an alarm began to whine.
“This is the part where you offer to cut me in on your deal and everybody goes home happy,” The Witness flatly intoned.
The Aussie smiled.
“Right, mate, what say we give you a third? Equal cut. And we all go home happy.”
“A third, huh?” the vigilante peppered his response with vulgarities of the worst kind reserved for degenerate thieves.
“Good thing I’m not a thief anymore, or I’d gut the both o' yous.”
The Witness let out a single burst from his assault rifle. The left knee of the Aussie erupted in a geyser of blood and he was down in the muck, screaming.
“Pick him up,” the vigilante threatened. “Pick him up and shimmy up that shaft and wait for the cops. Or I’ll see that the two of you are rat food. Or worse: gator bait. That bucket of chicken thighs I dropped off ain’t gonna hold Mr. White long. He crawls back. Finds you here ... all bloody and helpless ...,” Witness smacked his lips with obnoxious exaggeration.
The other man moved quickly, attaching his wounded and wailing partner into his chest harness. He latched himself to the cord hanging in the well and without a word, extricated himself from the sewer.
“Enjoy the show?” The Witness lit up a flashlight on his combat vest, exposing Gaius Cassius Longinus at a bend in the sewer line.
“You knew I was here?”
“Knew? Hell I followed you here. Figgered you were lost or something. Homeless wander off down here sometimes. Don’t often find their way back.”
“How humane of you to worry for my welfare. Is this where you shoot my legs out from under me?”
“You English?” The Witness asked, ignoring the witch-hunter’s disapproving tone.
“I’ve spent time there, yes. Actually, I guess you’d considered me Italian, I suspect. Sicilian, not to put too fine a point on it.”
“Yeah, you’re not like any Ginny I’ve ever known,” The Witness grunted. “Sure as hell, no Sicilian. So, not like I expect you to tell me, but you gotta name?”
“You can call me, Geoff.”
“OK, Jeffery,” the man replied. “They call me The Witness.”
“You’re a supra?”
“Not hardly. You think if I had powers I’d be draggin’ my ass around Sewerside? Get outta here. I ain't no cape. I’m one man making a difference.”
“Interesting,” Longinus smiled, “We may have a lot in common, I think.”
“I doubt that. You down here hunting criminals?”
“Funny you should mention it,” Longinus scanned the silver box on the cart before them. “What do you think they were doing?”
“Stealing. Crackers. I’m guessin’. This looks like some kind of safe.”
The box was brilliant and it scintillated in the light of The Witness’ flashlight. Intricately carved characters ran the length of the box in neatly scribed rows. The metal was whorled.
“Does that look like a safe to you?” asked Longinus.
“No. Looks like a casket.”
“A sepulcher, yes. Of unique design.”
“You think Dracula’s in it?” the former hit-man huffed.
“You know about vampires?”
“I know of them. Sure. Since the capes went public, you hear all kinds of things. Especially down here. Vampires. Werewolves. Mutant alligators, like Mr. White. I’ve seen a few blood sucking rats in my time. Mostly, you just get whack-jobs.”
“No vampires?”
“Nothing I ever put down got back up again, if that’s what you mean. No. No vampires.”
“This casket wasn’t designed for vampires, I shouldn’t think.”
“You some kind of mortician?”
“I’ve buried a few coffins,” Longinus smiled. “I’m a witch-hunter. My order ... My organization: hunts such things. A vessel such as this,” Longinus examined the inscriptions more closely, “would contain something more formidable than a vampire, I should think. With a box like that, you might capture the devil, himself.”
“Creepy, Jeffery.”
Longinus laughed a little.
“So, what do we do now?” the Grand Master raised his eyebrows to the vigilante.
“We? We don’t do nothin'. Me. I’m not in the return-swag business, I’m in the stop-crime business. Let the owner’s insurance comp' them for their loss or come looking for it. At this rate, they’ll be crawling all over this hole in about five minutes, and I aim to be long gone by then. Not to mention, Mr. White,” Witness huffed. “That freak is stupid, but vicious. The bucket of chicken I stashed was a diversionary appetizer he won’t take long to chow on. He’ll be back. And hungry.”
Longinus sized up his companion.
“My ... organization is always looking for good help. Perhaps we could help each other out?”
“Whattaya pay?”
“The satisfaction of a job well done and the warm embrace that comes with serving the greater good.”
“Oh. Nothing,” Witness nodded. “I already got a job that pays that. Without any bennies, I ain’t interested. Fighting crime in the slime costs money.”
“Perhaps compensation could be arranged,” Longinus offered, “As it turns out, I’m in need of a guide. I’m guessing you know more about this place than anyone I’m likely to encounter. Anyone human, anyway. And at the end, there’s sure to be a crime or two you can prevent, if we hurry.”
“The man who really knew this place was Knight Hawk,” Witness growled. “But looks like he hung up his feathers.”
The Inquisitor handed the note Alekseev scribbled to Witness, who scrutinized it.
“That’s the docks. Russians control that area. Red mob, not those shitnuts Vory fuckjobs. The Hawk was on to them. He figgered Rage was in bed with them.”
Longinus nodded.
“OK, Jeff,” the man mumbled in his Chicago twang, clicking off his flashlight and producing a compass that glowed in the dark, “you got me on charter wages. Let’s go see what your rooskies are up to.”
The two disappeared into the dank bleakness of Sewerside, headed towards the lake.
#
“Christ Almighty,” The Witness swore, heedless of the disapproving frown on Longinus’ face. The two were crammed together in a culvert on the dry side of the port leased by Boris Mogilnekov, looking out into the twenty-third bay of the Russian’s warehouse. A group congregated there, waiting.
“That’s some kind of cape convention.”
“That, I’m guessing, is Doktor Oktober,” Longinus offered.
“No kidding?” The Witness sounded truly surprised.
“The man next to him, the tall one that looks like a corpse: that’s the one they refer to as The Psyberian.”
“The ugly one, that’s the Grave Digger Mogilnekov. Him I know,” offered the vigilante. “He’s a capo in the Russian mob. Mostly prostitution and drug running. Didn’t know he was caught up with state supras, though. Who’s the black one?”
Longinus sighed, absently clutching a wooden carving a rhino in his hand.
“The black one I don’t know. But if I had to venture a guess, I’d say he’s a former agent of Collective 13. An Infiltrator,” Longinus surmised.
“If they are here,” Longinus’ face fell gravely, “then it spells big trouble.”
The two men watched as the minutes passed. A small group of Mogilnekov’s crew milled about, looking busy and steering clear of the three surpas in their midst.
An hour into their surveillance, the warehouse jumped to activity with the arrival of a large garbage truck. For reasons unclear to Longinus, a hint of recognition grew in him at the sight of the waste disposal vehicle.
The Witness let loose a profane oath as the driver and its passenger disembarked from the cab of the sanitation vehicle.
“Those two are reputedly on the lamb from the Russian federation. They are former Soviet supras who lead the Union before the fall,” Longinus explained. “Hammer. And Sickle. I’ll let you guess who is who.”
It was no hard task for the vigilante to make that guess.
Hammer was a seven foot tall brute of a man, with fists that were swelled as big as his wide head, but nimble fingered.
“Those meat hooks are effen huge,” he gasped. “Those could tear the top off a ... hell, anything.”
Sickle, was a svelte woman with jet-black hair and eyes to match. She was wrapped in a skin-tight jumpsuit sporting sheathed knives numbering in the dozens. As brutishly lethal as The Hammer appeared, Sickle was lithely so.
The two greeted Doktor Oktober, a short, balding old man dressed in a plain, well-tailored gray linen suit.
The conversation in Russian wafted up in fragmentary waves to Longinus and Witness, but the general mood was one of calm assurance.
The Russian supras disappeared into the warehouse office, leaving the mafiya crew, including Mogilnekov, outside.
“Well, big trouble is right, Jeffery,” The Witness growled. “These are some heavy hitters, boss. I don’t usually tangle with muties or capes. That freak Il Mostro that got nabbed here a while back, I had a run in with him down Sewerside. That was enough for me. Bastard bounced bullets ... NO. Took bullets and kept on going. This is too big for me. For us. We gotta call the Dangermen.”
Longinus squinted in confusion at The Witness.
“Troubleshooters. TAC-CON. I have a secure line to them. Sort of an ‘off the books’ professional courtesy arrangement. No way we go toe-to-toe with this crew and walk away from it. Leastways, not me.”
Longinus was resigned. He knew the vigilante was right. He also knew standard protocol for U.S. surpa-suppression was to contain and capture, not eliminate, which, from the Inquisitor’s perspective, was treating the symptoms not applying the cure.
“Do what you have to do,” he finally said to The Witness, who immediately got on a radio, spending several seconds setting a channel to a specific frequency. He hit a button.
“There. The call is in. Automated,” he explained in response to the quizzical face on Longinus. “All I do is hit the button and GPS is loaded via satellite to TAC-CON control. They know it’s from me. They know it means business.”
“Now what?” Longinus tucked the wooden rhino into his coat.
“Now we wait,” The Witness said, matter-of-factly. “Dangermen will arrive, set up a perimeter. Roadblocks to keep rubber-necking to a minimum. Despite all the publicity and Youtube videos, the feds like to maintain what they think is plausible denial. Yeah, right. Troubleshooters’ll call in the League. Chances are SPEARHEAD will tag along, if they pick up the call, and this place will become a shitstorm the likes of which you’ve never seen.
“Those SPEARHEAD goons don’t mess around. They’re real assholes. Pardon my French.”
Longinus shook his head slightly.
“Whattaya suppose is in the garbage truck?”
“Refuse?”
“Seriously?” The Witness doubted, “You think they really boosted a garbage truck? That would bring unwanted attention. Besides, in my former life, I was intimately familiar with the waste management business. That’s no ordinary garbage tow. Take a look.”
The Witness handed his IR goggles to Longinus, who held them up to his eyes like binoculars. The garbage trailer glowed intensely white amid the green of the view finder.
“That thing’s haulin’ something hot. And heavy. Look at the suspension.”
The truck was riding low, that was sure. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he remembered seeing the same rig days ago after his encounter with Sköll.
“Dirty bomb, you ask me,” The Witness declared.
“This is the part where you say, ‘Bada fongoo, let’s get the hell outta here’. You’re Italian. YaknowwhatI’msayin’,” Witness genuflected emphatically.
“I don’t speak your dialect,” the witch-hunter replied, dryly, “Besides. You think they’re going to detonate it here, with them so close? You’d have to be out of the state to survive that blast.”
“I can get us tickets, fast,” the vigilante replied with a grin.
Minutes later, the crew outside the office sprang to life, as the supras from the office emerged. The port-side bays opened. A fog horn trumpeted, as a small cargo ship was putting into port.
The men worked to lash the vessel to the dock and bring a crane about to latch onto a large shipping container on board the boat.
After securing the cargo, the crane lifted the container into the air and swung it around, lowering it to the crew in the warehouse.
Then, there he was. Holding what presumably was two unconscious Russian mobsters in each hand, hovering above the men and woman on the dock of the warehouse. His red-white-blue jumpsuit emblazoned with that single star shined in the electric light of the quay, his perfect teeth showing in a broad smile.
“I suppose it would be fruitless to ask to see the bill of lading or your passports at this juncture ...,” Mr. American shouted, “so I’ll skip the formalities and go right to the chase: That container hits this dock, and you’ve got a problem.”
Mr. American remained stationary in the air, several feet above Doktor Oktober and his speechless team. The cargo straps creaked in the silence.
“Quiet or riot. Your call, Doktor.”
The straps creaked again, followed by the stinging shrill of ripping metal, as the bottom of the cargo container split, sending its contents crashing to the dock below.
The mutant thing stood in the heap of garbage and offal that had accumulated on its voyage from Eastern Europe to the U.S., empty crates of potatoes, broken bottles of vodka, hollow tins of crackers, dry carboys of water, and balled-up chocolate bar wrappers.
The creature freed from its shipping container cage bellowed an inhuman cry of relief and rage. The thing was known to Mr. American--a former Soviet Supra that went by the code name Red Scare within the U.S. intelligence community. It was a failed experiment. More or less an attempt to gene-splice a human-animal hybrid, in this case Kodiak bear with Spetnatz soldatny. Bearclaw Berzurk, as he was now known to his Soviet counterparts, was a mass of convoluted veins and sinew, his great thews emerged in crimson viscera outside of his raw and sparsely furred skin. Strapped to his wrists were steel railroad rails, rusted and battered, but honed to sharp edges--makeshift claws added where science was unable to create them within the cross-matrix phenotype.
This irregular bulk stood nine feet tall atop legs that looked like they could scarcely hold half its weight, so that it often walked using his metal claws or fists as crutches. Its face was a twisted mess of human and ursine features, bearing many fangs of disproportionate lengths.
Red Scare brandished its ersatz claws and showed its malevolent teeth to everyone in the warehouse, enraged and confused.
“Dr. Livingstone,” Mr. American flatly called over his communications headset, “Please report to the dance floor. Your card is up.”
Mr. American deposited his two mobsters coarsely into a stack of crates nearby, and found footing on the docks, facing off against the ensemble of Soviets outside the office.
“Mr. American,” purred Sickle, “you are a real man.”
Sickle produced a series of blades in each hand from somewhere on her person and let them fly with swift precision towards American, who deftly dodged or slapped down each projectile with supra-human speed.
She paused, impressed but unconcerned.
“Lover,” she called, without taking her eyes off the American, “He’s all yours, sweetheart.”
The big man named Hammer cracked his monstrous knuckles in preparation for a fight.
Sickle turned to her comrade with eyes ablaze with encouragement, then under her breath she whispered, “Dosbedonya, lover.”
A blinding flash of brilliant orange flame tore through the metal roof above. Dripping liquid-steel rained down onto the mobsters below. Mogilnekov’s mooks, lead by their boss, began to scatter in a panic.
“Keep them here,” Doktor Oktober hissed at Psyberian.
The gaunt faced Soviet’s eyes rolled into his head, one of Dietrich Kandor’s more successful experiments as the Good Doktor Oktober: Psyberian was a supra-psychic and prodigy of the Nieobynchim’s Black Box program. Within seconds, the tumultuous crew of mafiya were returning to positions in defense of Oktober. Their horrified faces reflected the instincts their wills could not obey, gang-pressed into suicidal service at the mind of the Soviet psyker.
Sol arrived through the hole melted into the roof, a howling jet of glowing yellow fire that materialized into her solid, human form, wearing a supple white metal envelope that was more coating that clothing. With no hesitation, she plowed into Sickle, driving her backwards through the thin fiberboard walls of the warehouse office, opposite Oktober’s position.
The Hammer roared, flexing his massive fists into a fighting stance, ignoring American and stepping in to avenge his paramour.
With a single blow, Sol was sent tumbling through the air.
Red Scare was turning now to confront Mr. American, as the frail human contingent on the deck, mere automatons now, produced weapons and withdrew to relative safety behind whatever cover they could find--crates, oil drums, 3-ton sacks of pelletized taconite--in the warehouse.
The concrete flooring further to the front of the warehouse, on the street side, began to bow and buckle, erupting finally into a shower of cracked cement and clouds of earth, as a giant rockman emerged from underneath. The rain of rebar-reinforced concrete shot into the air as the metal strands snapped, tumbling down in chunks all about the battlefield along the dockside, driving many of the lesser beings to the floor.
“Doctor Livingstone, I presume,” the Psyberian offered, his blind eyes remaining focused on controlled the humans.
“Stop him,” growled a disgruntled Doktor Oktober.
The mind-controlled mobsters turned their weapons onto the man of stone in a hail of withering fire. The bullets impacted against Dr. Livingstone to no avail.
From the warehouse front, a gust of blue flame turned a large multi-framed window to liquid, as Shadrach burst into the warehouse.
Mr. American sidestepped the lashing talons of Red Scare, darting across the dock to confront The Hammer. The two exchanged blows.
Having lost its bead on Mr. American, Red Scare turned its attentions to the rockman lumbering towards the creature, as bullets sprayed off the stoneman’s back. In their overzealous attempts at dropping the stone thing, the scattering bullets of the mooks tore holes into Red Scare, which seemed to only aggravate the monster’s rage.
The crates serving as cover for the Russian mobsters were an instant conflagration, as Shadrach scorched them with a jut of blue flame. The men held to their posts, the terror in their eyes belying their loss of motor function.
“Leave them,” Oktober shouted to Psyberian. “Stop Livingstone.”
Psyberian sighed. He refocused his efforts, the veins in his face and head now bulged at the strain, his head seemingly growing before Oktober’s eyes as he redirected blood flow to improve his efforts.
The Russians, suddenly regaining their senses, fled in abject terror and ran amok to save themselves.
The Soviet supra-psyker was frothing now, choking and groaning, his teeth clenched tightly, crackling with the effort.
Mind control would not work with the stoneman, but telekinesis might.
Slowly, the rock behemoth lifted off the pad and into the air, floating higher and higher off the warehouse floor, towards the turmoil on the docks. The thickening pace and tremendous exertion on Psyberian was outwardly apparent, as his nose began to bleed and spittle ran out from his clenched jaws.
Red Scare rushed Dr. Livingstone, slashing into the air attempting to reach the hovering, floating rock.
“Fool!” Oktober shouted. “Leave him!”
But the command was unheeded, as the big mutant continued to struggle to reach its target.
Shadrach turned to face Oktober, a whirling ball of blue heat floating above the wooden structure beneath his feet, now reduced to carbon dust, when Shadrach was distracted by the presence of an armed shadow to his left flank.
“Comrade, Izralivech,” Kommissar Kalashinkov--Krulevich--shouted, just before a volley of gun fire exploded towards the flaming man. The bullets evaporated before they could reach the target.
Krulevich closed, his guns glowing red hot as he approached Shadrach. The shadow figure discarded the useless weapons, the heat reaching through his metal skin and searing him with pain he could not prevent.
“Can’t take the heat, comrade?” Shadrach laughed.
“Bearclaw!” Krulevich screamed, “The metal. Throw it!”
Red Scare, snapped to attention at the voice of his true master with lightening speed. The beast swiped a steel claw across the taconite bags on the pier, sending a shower of metal pellets down onto Shadrach. The metal turned molten, fused into a shell of white-hot iron all about the blazing blue form of Abraham Izralivech, weighting him down and setting the dockside ablaze. The flaming man was held fast in the thick metal as he plummeted into the lake below.
A geyser of water vapor extinguished Shadrach’s flames and cooled the iron tomb entrapping him. A sizzling gout of steam shot up into the air in screeching protest against the cold lake water. The cloud immediately sent condensation falling back down into the warehouse.
The interior of the warehouse was now a rain storm.
Mr. American locked Hammer’s massive fists above his head and with a great leap, planted both feet into the man’s barrel chest. His foe sailed, sending him slamming into feeble Psyberian. The shock broke his concentration, and Livingstone dropped--an avalanche crashing down onto Red Scare. The crushing weight buckled the timbers beneath them, and the two giants fell into Lake Michigan
“Release Marko!” Doktor Oktober screamed to The Hammer.
Recovering, Hammer pulled himself up and scrambled into the cab of the idling garbage truck. He ripped open a control box façade inside the cab, revealing a large, red LAUNCH button.
“POTEMKIN ... The Atomnikista!” Hammer proclaimed, a battle cry aimed at Mr. American.
With a powerful punch, he smashed the safety glass covering the button.
With a wheezing burst of gas, the truck bay cracked open. The door stuck, but something inside exploded. Fiery bolts launched from the truck’s bay doors, ricocheting throughout the warehouse.
A smoking steel-encased form, a monstrous cosmonaut, launched from the back of the truck, a gray contrail running out behind it as the mechanoid vaulted forth and through the roof above, leaving behind a fresh hole to the night sky littered with starshine, the hint of dawn rising.
The din of the battle grew quiet, amidst the crackling of flames and the cries of the wounded.
A great roar rose from the dock, as Red Scare pulled himself free of the water, only to be slammed back into the drink by the cascading upper half of the garbage truck’s bay door.
Outside the warehouse, the metal exoskeleton, roughly resembling a man but much taller, landed before Carver DeVreese. The Troubleshooter’s onboard Nuclear-Biological-Chemical detector spiked alarmingly.
The thing dwarfed the TAC-CON sergeant, its battlesuit bristling with weaponry. A glass bubble revealed his only human features, a head looking this way and that and all around, getting his bearings with his new-found freedom.
The head in the bubble considered the Troubleshooter for a moment then spoke in slow gasps, his voice filtered through a muffled speaker.
“Greetings, comrade. I am Marko Petrovich. I respectfully request ... political asylum.”
DeVreese stood, stunned.
“I think you’ll need to take that up with a higher authority, sir,” was all he could say.
Mr. American stood on the smoldering pier, condensate raining all about him. Sol was barely walking out of the rubble, dazed from the shot she’d taken from Hammer. Livingstone was MIA along with Shadrach.
Psyberian stood, tremors wracking his body. A bloody gash on his forehead ran rivulets of red where an explosive bolt from the garbage truck door had clipped him, his nose gushing crimson. Oktober offered no assistance, but stared down the man in red, white, and blue.
“American. Meet your doom. My atomic man will reduce you to cinders and our efforts will be redoubled.”
“You may want to hold off on posturing, Kandor,” Psyberian announced, rubbing his aching temples and wiping the gore away from his nose. The mechaniod Potemkin came crashing into the warehouse, creating a door in an outside wall, tearing it away like paper. Kandor ignored the caveat.
“Potemkin!” Oktober yelled, “Attack!”
“I request political asylum,” the giant cyborg called out. “I want to be American!”
“You got it, partner,” Mr. American grinned. “You’re on the clock!”
“This is what I’m saying,” Psyberian held a hand over his bloodied forehead.
“Fools,” spat Oktober. “Get us out of here,” he growled to the Psyberian.
“Kandor!” Mogilnekov appeared at the other end of the warehouse, waving an automatic pistol. “You’ve ruined me! You. Rage. Mostro! You and your freaks!”
Oktober didn’t have to give the word, Psyberian summoned his concentration, rolled his eyes back. Instantly, Boris “Grave Digger” Mogilnekov’s head disappeared in a cloud of red-gray mist. His body lingered upright for several moments, a puppet without its strings.
Psyberian moved quickly, redirecting his focus to four of Mogilnekov’s men still in the warehouse, hiding from the carnage. They emerged, all four holding guns to each others' heads in a daisy chain that promised to be a spectacular display of horror.
Mr. American froze.
“Move one more inch ...,” Psyberian’s voice was low and distant, inhuman--a renewed trickle of blood bubbled out of his nose, “and these men will go to their graves because of you, American.”
Without so much as a jump, Oktober and Psyberian levitated from the warehouse floor and flew out through the hole left in the wake of their mechanical comrade.
“Wait!” The Hammer cried out as his leader floated out to freedom. “Kandor! You betrayer!”
Mr. American was on The Hammer quickly, a well-placed jab to his chest drove the wind from his lungs, and the big Russian dropped to the deck. American drove his knee into Hammer’s lower back with surgical precision. The Russian dropped faced down, unconscious.
Sol performed a similar feat of violence on Sickle, and soon had her in custody.
“Help!” a cry went up at the dock side, as a naked man, frail and struggling to keep his grip, crawled up onto the pier from a mooring post.
“Livingstone, what’s your SITREP?” Mr. American asked.
“I’m fine. Shadrach is drowning!”
“Robot, rescue that man!” Mr. American hollered to Potemkin.
A set of cylinders on Potemkin’s back fired into service, and the metal monster hovered.
“Gladly, American. And, I’m not a robot, comrade. I’m a man.”
“Sorry,” Mr. American said, but Potemkin was into the water before American could repeat his request.
Moments later, Potemkin reappeared, carrying a choking Shadrach, his head barely clearing the pile of still-steaming metal, now gray and hardened, holding the supra fast.
“Oh, we’re gonna need a cutting torch,” Mr. American laughed at sight of his trapped teammate.
“I can do it,” Shadrach coughed. He began to glow with blue flames.
“Gonna take all day?” Mr. American winked.
“Bring out hot dogs and we make picnic. True-Blue, yes?,” Potemkin wheezed, smiling from within his protective bubble.
“Very good,” Mr. American smiled. “Now, you think you can grab the mutant?”
The man in the big battlesuit returned the smile, “Da!” he cried and plunged back into the lake, retrieving Red Scare, already comatose from the battering he received.
Mr. American hailed the Troubleshooters on the outside over his comlink.
“Big brawl is over, TAC-CON. Requesting custodial assistance with perpetrators, over.”
The com crackled.
“Negative, League,” DeVreese’s voice popped over the headset. “TAC-CON is off jurisdiction. SPEARHEAD is on scene.”
“Wonderful,” Mr. American responded, not hiding his lack of enthusiasm, “Roger that. League, out.”
Gaius Cassius Longinus watched the events unfold from the safety of the culvert.
“Old gods at play,” he whispered sadly.
“That’s got them all,” The Witness nodded.
“No,” the witch-hunter contradicted. “There’s one still at-large.”
The Inquisitor handed the IR goggles to The Witness and indicated a darkened corner of the warehouse. The vigilante watched through the view finder as a green form, glowing white from the heat hotter than any man could bear, let alone survive, disappeared through a sewer grate, escaping into Sewerside.
“The Infiltrator,” Longinus growled. “Time to hunt.”