Wind howled through invisible spires. A gentle snow carpeted the ground and drifted lazily around the cloaked towers, never quite touching them and settling in subtle, tell-tale piles around the base of the edifice that was simultaneously there but not there. Crows circled the thermals generated by the castle in one of the taller Colorado Rockies as winter stalked in, but even in the heat-seeing spectrum of infrared, the structure still remained hidden. With some effort, it could be found, and even entered, but for uninvited guests, the accomplishment would be both fruitless and short-lived.
Hidden inside the light-bending walls of the remote citadel was the technological genius that had designed it, along with the architects of unspeakable evil. The only creatures that ventured near the structure were the circling crows, attracted to the warmth and the occasional barely-identifiable carcass that would be ejected from it. The smooth, invisible surface of it didn’t allow the birds anywhere to perch, but there were plenty of tall evergreens nearby that gave them the shelter they needed.
The occupants welcomed the large black birds. On the rare event that a lone hiker or hunter accidentally approached too near, the presence of so many crows often unnerved them so much that they left on their own. Those that did not were often never seen again, or returned with stories of experiences so outlandish that their credibility was often permanently damaged.
All of this was by design. Housed inside was the head of the most insidious and connected criminal and terrorist empire on earth. While America and its heroes looked outside at the world in fear thanks to drugs, black market weapons and acts of terror, the source of much of it sat nestled in the idyllic, rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains. Like a tapeworm of villainy, the organization sat in the belly of one of the world’s most powerful, wealthy and influential countries. Unlike a typical parasite however, their actions were not rotting America from the inside as a side effect of their actions. Their corrupting influence was deliberate, a surreptitious needle inserted into bloodlines of a prosperous nation and slowly administering a subtle but ultimately lethal supply of poison.
Deep inside the invisible fortress, alone in the dimly lit room, an unusual woman daydreamed. The room was large and windowless, filled with the quiet drum of air conditioning. One wall was dominated by a curved bank of giant floor-to-ceiling OLED monitors, the cold modern technology providing diffuse light. The rest of the room would have seemed perfectly appropriate in an old world castle. Lush, detailed carpets covered the floor, while decorative curtains and tapestries adorned the walls, giving the impression that they held back the daylight, but in reality they were merely decorative.
The woman sat on a huge ornate throne made of dark exotic woods and inlaid with gold in elaborate designs. It had been made for a nobleman in some far-off country, but had never made it to its intended owner thanks to the machinations of the seated daydreamer. She’d pulled strings to appropriate the chair; pulling strings was her trade, it was as if it was what she was born to do. Absent-mindedly, she raised a hand and lazily swiped it through the air over one of the armrests of her throne. Simultaneously, the images on all five monitors slid to the left and off the screens, replaced by videos.
Still more lines laid by the woman fed streams of imagery, all of it misery. Her influence was wide, and cameras placed by her network were hidden in almost every major city worldwide. Sometimes the monitors showed scenes of chaos and violence; she’d witnessed the coups of African governments, with democratically elected presidents deposed by tyrannical dictators. She’d watched genocide in action. Murders. Muggings.
Torture.
She gained a voyeuristic joy at this imagery. The beatings, beatings and shootings. These societies were raw marble just waiting to be carved into an ambitious leader’s image. In the chaos she saw potential for order, for control.
Another swipe changed the feeds, this time showing the more “cultured” western societies, where misery was measured in poor drive-through service and spilled lates, or in social inequality. To her, these cultures were already crafted, which bothered her. There was no opportunity for creativity, just drone-like conformity and pointless existence defined by consuming. Such contemporary comforts enraged her. Everyone in the western world whined about missed buses and the wrong condiments on their burgers, when those living in the raw materials of a cultured world experienced true hardships; famine, disease and drought.
She had been forged in fires of such a burgeoning society. The heat and pressure that formed the limestone of a savage land into marble that was apartheid, to be later carved into a true democracy. The woman had been born in the days before Nelson Mandela found his freedom and South Africa shed its chains of oppressive minority-dominated rule. She had suffered worse than most, because even her own people looked at her as something to be hated and feared.
The daydreamer steepled her delicate fingers in front of her bright red lips, rested her palms on the ebony balls on the armrests of her throne, and folded her hands across her lap. She was a simultaneously frightening and elegant creature, like the spider she resembled. Deep black skin, sharp, intelligent light brown eyes, and three pairs of slender, well-toned arms.
Born in a Soweto slum in South Africa, she had only known hardship and poverty. The unusually tall six armed child was treated with fear and distrust, and she had only known fear and distrust until the day a nice white man with kind eyes offered her a warm meal and a chance to live indoors. After that first meal, he taught her a new lesson in fear and distrust. The white controlled government had already dedicated money and resources to forced gender reassignment surgery for homosexuals, and the man was a doctor who had worked on that project for years. Now he had his hands on one of the rare people born with extraordinary abilities.
He quickly discovered the girl’s keen intellect. Even without a formal education, she was skilled in math and reading, and surprisingly adept with all six of her arms, performing complex tasks with all of them simultaneously with seemingly little effort. As a result, she was subject to horrific tests and experiments. but they paled in comparison to the good doctor’s controlled vivisections on her. Without anesthetic, she would be chemically paralyzed, cut open, and studied. He wanted to know what gave her such incredible control over her body.
The old memories of those days still stung, but they were her fuel, reason for moving forward. The decadent world of the west didn’t understand or appreciate the basic privilege they enjoyed in day to day existence. They should be ecstatic to wake every day and have warm meals and easy access to technology. Instead, they scaled their misery to their surroundings, finding unhappiness in a sea of comfort.
The little girl from Soweto had designs to change all of that. In the years following her escape, she had managed to build a worldwide criminal empire. From her throne, she filled bank accounts with ill-gotten money, sowed revolution, and made connections with some of the most powerful criminals in the world. Now she was calling on that network to realize a dream she’d held since childhood. It required cooperation and coordination from the kind of people who lived to terrorize and kill; people for whom no human life save their own was of any significance.
She had chosen the name Arachne for herself. Her terrified family had never bothered to name her, simply referring to her as “Demon” when they thought she couldn’t hear them. She thought the name was fitting beyond her resemblance to a human spider. In the Greek myth, Arachne was ruined out of jealousy and hate, and only after she died did she find pity. That was how the lady-spider saw her place in life. All was pain and suffering, and she died almost daily for years on an operating table.
Now was her rebirth. Now she was resurrected as the spider, talented at weaving webs of ruin, connecting disparate lines and making them work together for her gain at the expense of others, venomously killing those that stood in her way and draining their resources so all that was left was a dead husk. It was as if she was born for this life, as if nature itself had designed the perfect criminal genius.
Except for her lengthened torso and multiple arms, no one would now recognize her as the little Zulu girl from Johannesburg. Now nearly seven feet tall, she had been sculpted by her only trusted companion, into an image of surreal beauty. Her vivisection scars had been molded and reshaped into an hourglass on her stomach. She wore suggestive clothing, revealing too much in some places with the purpose of off-putting people she met on the rare occasions she agreed to speak to others. She had become obsessed with her appearance over the years and would allow nothing but perfection in her own form.
Vicissitude, her most trusted partner and companion, had worked her into something even less “normal” than would be expected, enhancing her feminine features to exaggerated proportions and suppressing many of her more African features to resemble an almost comic-book standard of the Western ideal of beauty. Her most striking features were her elongated, sharpened incisors and first two premolars on her upper jaw giving her the appearance of four fangs. Along with her catlike amber eyes, she was equally beautiful and terrifying.
However, her most powerful asset was her mind. She cleanly separated herself from a world she had learned not to trust. She had been forced to live in the margins of a society that would not accept her, and in those margins, Arachne created connections throughout the underworld and spent her life learning. The result was a woman armed to the sharpened teeth with technological genius and a Machiavellian talent for manipulation.
She had developed the advanced metamaterials that rendered her fortress invisible. The same miracle materials redirected sunlight into advanced solar collectors that provided her installation with free energy, and any excess was stored using large supercapacitors made of diamond-hard carbon nanotubes. Any one of her developments would have changed the entire world for the better, but she refused to share.
For years she had quietly observed the world, and using her connections in the underground, had changed the courses of nations. She started wars, created up drug lords, and sowed chaos where she could. However her ambitions had recently changed. With decades of controlling and directing others behind her, Arachne had grown tired of simply manipulating from the shadows. She wanted to rule.
And she wanted to punish the world that refused to accept her and tortured her for simple curiosity.
Her web was spreading. There were others out in the world like her; freaks with no moral compass, that possessed powers that would wreak havoc, spread fear and chaos.
Powers that could end the world.
A plan was germinating in her mind, and she had made the necessary contacts to coordinate and put that plan into action. The infamous Golem, an Eastern European monster of a man with a genius rivalling her own had accepted an invitation to her home, and was even then speeding across the globe in a stealth ship to meet Arachne. Among others.
An evil smile cracked her too-perfect red lips, causing a single fang to slip over it. She wanted the world to burn, and to spit-roast the human race over it.
One room over from the Spider Queen of Crime was her closest friend, a monster of a human who went by the name Vicissitude. He was an artist, with the skill of H.R. Giger and the artistic sensibilities of Dr Mengele. While he could sculpt stone and clay like a modern Michelangelo, his chosen medium was flesh, and he had a natural ability to mold it as easily as a child might silly putty.
Early in life he’d discovered the ability to mold flesh and bone as easily as clay, both his own and other’s. All flesh was his plaything. He had the skill to create extreme beauty, as in the case of Arachne. He had turned her into an unearthly creature of almost divine perfection, although he preferred the opposite. To him, there was hidden allure in the grotesque. When he was young, he would deform small animals and try to keep them alive as long as he could. Eventually he learned how to merge them, creating miniature abominations like a rat with a snake threaded through it, or a chicken with a mouse head.
Vicissitude was a gifted traditional artist who could paint, sculpt and carve all with equal aptitude and detail. In his early twenties, he’d managed to carve out a niche as a plastic surgeon of sorts for the porn industry, creating “natural” enhancements for actors and actresses for substantial profits. It was through these connections that he’d met Arachne, and he was immediately captivated by her mind and appearance.
Alongside her, he was free to experiment and create; his only limits were his fevered, twisted imagination. With Arachne, his cruelty flourished; Vicissitude became the go-to punishment for turncoats and opponents of the eight-limbed woman. Rather than simply killing the opposition, they would deform them, turn them into crippled mutations and left to suffer as a warning to others.
Arachne knew she had his ultimate, undying loyalty. He had become obsessed with her, making her the perfect woman and the perfect monster in his eyes. She was the only beauty in his world; all other things were ugly, so he put them in their place by making them uglier, even himself. If the necessity arose, he would mold himself back to his “real” own face and body, but most often, his form was that which reflected his soul; a twisted, grotesque monster. His hair was sparse, ribs showed through taught skin on his torso. One eye was larger, and his mouth sagged as if it had been stretched down and it couldn’t snap back into shape. He made one leg thick and muscular and the other shriveled and twisted. He limped around his studio wallowing in every ecstatic twinge of pain his broken form gave him.
He was now busy designing an army of horror that they would unleash on the world when the time came. With clay and with computers and paper, he painstakingly designed creatures that would spread horror and pestilence. When the time came, he would mold them by hand, each one a tribute of pain and terror to the woman who had become his muse. In between planning, he painted a large canvas which would soon hang in his love’s viewing room next door. It was a play on Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, with Arachne in place of Jesus and Vicissitude as Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Everyone else in the image was one of his victims. He could remember them in incredible detail; every line, every fold, every mangled creature that had once been a human broken by his hands was burned into his memory. Every time he recalled one, it was like a shot of morphine in his arm. His mismatched eyes rolled back into his skull as he recalled the details of the beauty pageant queen whose rich father had hired some of Arachne’s goons to fix the contest. When he refused to pay because one of the judges refused to be bribed, Vicissitude had paid his daughter a visit.
From beauty to freakish beast, the young woman had gone almost immediately insane and killed herself as soon as the opportunity presented itself. Her father soon followed, consumed by guilt over what he’d turned his only child into. Vicissitude giggled in frightening glee over the memory.
Unknowingly, he smiled in tandem with his love. The world was soon to become a much more exciting place to live.
Hours away from Arachne’s domain was a bustling metropolis that was beginning to succumb to her venom. The City was huge; twelve million people occupied the sprawling cityscape, going about their lives as most normal people would, but in recent years, most of those people began to fear for their safety. Violent crime had been on a steady rise for the last decade. Drug cartels had gained a foothold, gun and human trafficking were almost as lucrative and common as liquor stores, and the police we becoming overwhelmed. On average, between three and ten officers were lost to death or injury in the past five years.
Many things were blamed, illegal immigrants, lack of education, even satan. Very few people had noticed there was a pattern to it all. Most that did and said anything about it disappeared or met with accidents. The wise kept their mouths shut. In the case of Detective Arya Gutierrez, she’d been building a mountain of evidence pointing to a single source pulling strings behind the rise in crime, but it wasn’t self-preservation that kept her from speaking to the mayor or chief about her findings. She was biding her time. The Spider Queen of Crime was not the only predator in the jungle.
The City had everything you would expect in a giant urban zone; parks, an active downtown filled with glass and steel skyscrapers, rich and poor areas, slums, clogged industrial areas. In the cracks of this thriving society were organized crime families from around the world and a network of gangs and cartels that made some sections of the City off limits to anyone who didn’t carry a weapon for a living. Urban decay had turned several previously prosperous neighborhoods into cancerous warzones.
The wealthy and much of the middle class would have simply ignored this reality if it didn’t spill over into their world with alarming regularity. Occasionally wealthy neighborhoods would become the scene of a mob hit, and drugs had metastasized through all rungs of the economic ladder. As recently as a week before, two students in an upper middle class high school had been stabbed over failure to pay drugs debts. One died on the way to the hospital and the other would spend the rest of his life going to the bathroom into a bag.
In a nicer part of the City’s downtown was a shining clean apartment building. While not immune to the disease that was eating the City alive, it was unusually safe and unmarred. It was into this building that Detective Gutierrez pulled her car. She settled for the first spot she could find, and impatiently clicked the remote on her keychain to lock her car as she raced to the door for the stairwell; the elevator was too slow for her liking, and she needed to get back out as soon as possible.
The detective took the steps three at a time as she raced up to the thirtieth floor of the massive glass and steel structure. Arya reached her floor in no time, with barely a drop of sweat to show for her effort. She calmly opened the door to the hallway and strolled to her apartment without any indication she was in a hurry; self control was Detective Gutierrez’s greatest talent. She waved hello to Mrs Reinhold as the elderly woman walked Muffin, her beagle down the hall to the elevator for her nightly walk. Reinhold was all wrinkles and dyed hair, her face marked by decades of too many smiles, or in her words, “just enough.”
Mrs Reinhold wasn’t afraid to go out at night, because there was a protector in the city; little did she realize it was the tall woman who knelt down and said “Hello puppy...” to Muffin as she walked to the elevator. She only knew Arya as the nice police woman who lived down the hall and loved dogs. Despite her hurry, detective Gutierrez paused longer than she thought prudent as the beagle happily licked her hand, then propped herself on Arya’s knee and licked her face.
“Okay, Muffin. Leave the nice police lady alone. She’s not made of hot dogs, you know.” The cop smiled up at the old woman who winked at her then gave her dog a gentle tug. “Thank you Mrs Reinhold, be safe.” She said as she hurried off to her apartment. “Always am, dear.” said the elderly woman over her shoulder as she waved and walked away.
Once inside, the detective closed the door and locked it, then began stripping down to her underwear. She tossed her clothes into a the laundry basket then ran into her walk-in closet. In the back was a large steel locker with a cypher lock. It filled the entire back wall and was hidden behind a piece of sheetrock on hinges expertly crafted to look like an unremarkable back wall. She punched in the code and with a hiss the heavy metal door swung open, revealing a suit of matte-black armor.
She donned a mesh under-suit that regulated her body temperature and absorbed the impact of anything from bullets to bats by becoming rigid and redirecting the force around her, while remaining supple otherwise. Over this, she wore a chest plate of carbon fiber and titanium ballistic armor. Interlocking pieces of the same material covered her arms and legs, as well as the gloves and boots. The suit was light but strong; non-reflective black and strong enough to turn away a point-blank shotgun blast. The face of the helmet was charcoal gray, and shaped like a skull, designed to strike fear in her opponents. The overall outline of the suit was shaped to fit her comfortably with the minimum of padding to get in her way, but was otherwise non-descript. It allowed her to keep a low profile, even in close quarters combat.
The finishing touch was a long-bladed sword that she wore on a scabbard around her waist. It, too was made of flat-black carbon. It was sharp as chipped obsidian and unbreakable as diamond. The design was that of a Japanese katana, only the blade was longer, roughly four feet long. Despite the size of the blade, it was a light and nimble weapon; She wielded it with the skill and ease of a samurai. Officer Gutierrez had acquired the name Carbon by criminals and the media because of her appearance, and she embraced it gladly. The sword was her scythe, and she used it to cut evil from the streets.
Carbon considered herself less a vigilante and more a corrector of legal errors. While she worked as a homicide detective as her “day job”, at night, she tracked down the vilest of criminals that had escaped prosecution and gave them an option; turn yourself in and confess your crimes and let the justice system do its job, or face her. The smart ones were safely rotting in prison; the others were safely rotting in the ground. It was a path she had avoided much of her life, but eventually, as crime grew worse and worse in the city, she found she could not in good conscience stand by and do nothing. Given her natural abilities, she felt that she was meant to do more than interview witnesses and collect evidence in the fight against the ever-tightening fist of disorder that was squeezing the city.
She quickly put on her armor, which was designed to easily snap into place to save time, then strapped on her sword and drew it. After a few practice swings, she slid it back into the scabbard and went through a series of stretches to make sure she was nimble and that her suit was on properly.The armor and sword had been a gift from one of the few people who knew of her double life; a wealthy philanthropist and technological genius who had lost his children to drugs. Carbon had previously been fighting in ballistic body armor with a replica sword, her natural abilities making her more than a match for the armed gang members and drug dealers she fought. When news broke about the presence of a new “masked hero” taking on the city’s worst unpunished criminals, he spared no expense tracking her down. Edwin Pennyworth was a billionaire tech leader from England who had moved to the City decades before to capitalize on what was being called “the second Silicon valley.” He and his wife had settled in and worked diligently to boost the local economy and inject money into the charities of their new home.
Unfortunately, cancer had claimed his wife when his children were in high school, and his son had taken her death particularly hard. He turned to heroin, and when he failed to pay off his debts to a dealer after Edwin had cut off his access to the family money, the dealer’s gang punished him with a drive-by shooting. Edwin’s daughter had been standing next to her brother and was one of five people killed at the scene. His son survived for 2 weeks on life support before succumbing. The dealer never saw a day in prison because his lawyer convinced the jury that the hit was unrelated to the young Pennyworth, and had instead been intended for one of the other victims, who belonged to a rival gang.
When Edwin made contact with Carbon, he proposed a deal; he would supply her with state of the art equipment as long as she promised to use it to continue her work, and if she brought the man who was responsible for his children’s death to justice. Within a week of its delivery, Carbon had caught the dealer. It had taken less than five minutes to get the coward to concede and turn himself in. He received a life sentence, but didn’t survive his first year in jail; men who put out hits on kids usually aren’t the kind that make friends easily. That was five years prior, and since then Carbon had become one of the city’s most feared denizens among the criminal underworld.
Carbon was a remarkable human, with exceptional agility and strength, and the ability to suffer what would be fatal wounds to any other person and heal from them in seconds. Like many “heroes” and “villains” that had emerged in the past several decades, she was simply born with these abilities. With the armor and sword, her opponents never stood a chance. She discovered her abilities as a middle schooler and had kept the knowledge to herself. Her family, schoolmates and teachers only knew her as an amazing athlete with incredible endurance, despite the fact that she had consistently held back.
As a freshman in highschool, she could dead-lift over four hundred pounds. She had taken karate from a young age, but introduced gymnastics, swimming, judo and kenpo once she realized she was superpowered. She would practice blocks with a baseball machine, standing a mere ten feet away from it. She’d never paid much attention to scratches or bruises before, but after she missed a ball and caught it with her nose, she understood her ability to super heal. Her face was smashed, her nose bent over to the side and bruising immediately forming under her eyes. She cleaned the blood from her upper lip and had watched in amazement as her nose straightened and the bruising disappeared. When she touched it, it had no longer hurt.
Not long after that accident, her final ability had developed. She had an overdeveloped intuition that bordered on a psychic ability. She could read a situation or a person so well and subconsciously, that she could often predict their next move before they even had a chance to act on it. This ability had made her an amazing detective.
She had gone to college after high school, earning degrees in criminal justice and psychology. She was a shoo-in at the academy right after graduation, and excelled in her class. Unfortunately, she did not get to share the joy of her second graduation with her family. In the same year that marked the sudden, dramatic increase in lawlessness in the City, when she had two weeks left before graduation, a man high on heroin fell asleep at the wheel and hit the van Gutierrez’s family was in. Her mother, father, brother and grandmother were killed as the car veered into them at eighty miles an hour. The force of the crash upended the van and pushed it off the overpass to a parking lot thirty feet below.
Showing a fortitude that would carry her through a decade of heartbreaking cases, she swallowed her grief and completed her time in the academy. She buried her family and decided upon the path that led her to Pennyworth, and continued tonight to the next life-ruining piece of garbage.
Tonight she was after a man named Mark Tucker. Tucker was an arms dealer with a history of violence towards women. He’d recently avoided prosecution when one of his victims died in a “car accident” and the other two suddenly became too afraid to testify. Arya knew where he would be that night, and was determined to ensure that tonight was his last night as a free man. She closed her eyes and concentrated visualizing the route from her building to one of the City’s growing ghettos, to a meth lab where her contacts had indicated he would be selling guns to the people who ran it.
Carbon looked out over the City from her balcony. Her apartment faced the heart of its downtown district, overlooking one of its huge parks. The night sky was clear, and she breathed deeply as a cool wind blew past. She loved the cityscape, so her apartment view was worth every penny she paid for it. She crawled over the rail of the building and started quickly crawling down to the street level into the alley behind the building. The gloves and boots of her suit clung to the walls using the same principle as gecko feet, called Van der Waals forces. She stuck to the walls as easily in rain as on a dry night. She crawled face down, peeling her palms and toes off the outside of the building and placing them back down, climbing like a tiny lizard. Once she paused as a tenant of her building walked out onto their balcony and flicked the butt of a cigarette over the side. With reflexes like a striking snake, she caught the still glowing cigarette. She flicked it at the back of the man’s head as he walked back into his apartment and chuckled as she heard his surprised yelp as his hair singed. In under a minute, she had climbed from the thirtieth floor to the ground in the alley behind her building.
After a short stroll to a back entrance to the subway system, Carbon was on her way toward the lab and Tucker. She quickly, carefully crawled along the grimy tunnel walls listening for an approaching car and taking care to remain hidden. When an opportune moment presented itself, she flung herself onto a passing subway train and let it carry her to within blocks of her destination. The booming sound of the subway was muffled by her helmet that fortunately was built with noise dampeners. Edwin had accounted for the fact that she was likely to encounter heavy gunfire in her line of work. She inched backward until she was dangling from the back of the train, then released her grip, dropping into a graceful roll. She redirected her momentum and was up and running toward the nearest concealed exit.
Within minutes she was topside, and quicker still on the rooftop of an old abandoned building, scouting the quickest route to Tucker’s location. She made a running leap from the rooftop she was on to the next one down, effortlessly clearing the sixty feet between them and rolling through the momentum of the thirty foot drop without any signs of effort. She cleared the four other buildings on the way in a similar fashion, then quietly descended to the back door of the lab.
What served as the lab was likely once a strip mall. the glass front had been boarded up long ago, and its remote location in the dying neighborhood made it hard to detect from the outside. No doubt the people running it knew that if it blew up, the authorities would be slower to respond to the armpit of the city than if it were located in a residential area. The back door was guarded by a lone man with a poorly concealed shotgun in his coat. Still clinging to the wall, Carbon positioned herself just above the guard silently facing down. She slowly rotated her legs over, doing a slow somersault while her hands still clung to the wall, then dropped her legs around his neck. With a quick, forceful squeeze, she knocked him out cold, then using her grip on the wall as a fulcrum, flexed her torso and lifted him, still dangling by her legs, onto the roof.
He would be the lucky one if things got ugly.
She dropped to the ground and quietly walked to the side of the building. She had assumed that Tucker would be alone in a side room counting his money; her intuition had not failed her. Peering in through the broken panes of dirty glass, she saw the man flipping through stacks of bills inside a brief case. He was a late middle aged man, balding, wearing a cheap but important-looking dark blue suit. In the split second it took for him to look down and grab another stack, Carbon had unlatched the window through the broken pane, slid it open and slipped inside.
Mark Tucker inhaled sharply at the noise and was dumbstruck by what stood in front of him. Five foot nine, covered in black plates, with piercing bright blue eyes drilling into him from behind a deep grey skull. A quiet, woman’s voice spoke. “Mark Tucker, you will turn yourself in to the ninth precinct, confess to gun smuggling, physical and sexual assault, and obstruction of justice now, or you will never leave this city block alive.”
He slowly set the money down. “I have no intention of going to prison.”
“If that is your choice, I will honor it.” There was no humor in her words, just the promise of death.
Tucker smiled, crooked, bright white teeth showed, but Carbon could see the fear in his eyes. His certain world was just invaded by a news story he’d seen time and again; the City’s most corrupt cut to pieces by a masked avenger. “I plead the fifth. I can’t be coerced into incriminating myself.”
“You’ve had due process and gamed the system.”
“I skipped Lady Justice’s scales so you’re the sword?”
Carbon let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “You can leave this building breathing, or you can leave in a bag. I don’t care which.”
“I don’t think I want to. Maybe you can discuss that with my friends.” He finished loudly over his shoulder. There was the sound of shuffling and quiet swearing outside the door, which was then kicked in by a large man with an oversized pistol. Three thugs rushed in, and Carbon figured there were at least six more in the larger part of the building.
Carbon never flinched, she didn’t even move. “Are these, ‘men’, willing to die for you?” She asked, making it clear that she considered them men in only the most literal of terms.. Two of the men pointed hand guns at the armored woman while a third approached to her left, his Desert Eagle pointed at her face. Inside she smiled. You could always tell the which guy was going to be the biggest blowhard by who carried the biggest, most unwieldy gun. They were the giant pickup truck drivers of the criminal world. This guy was no different, all glamor muscles and stringy black hair; while his oversized .50 caliber pistol looked intimidating, he likely couldn’t hit the broadside of a aircraft hangar with it in a stiff wind.
Mark had relaxed visibly when his lackey had placed the barrel of his gun against the side of Carbon’s head. He chuckled. “No, but I’m sure you’ll do.” He motioned to the man, whose finger closed on the trigger. A deeply unsettling laugh crept out of Carbon’s armored mouth. The thug fired, but before the bullet had a chance to leave the barrel, Carbon’s head snapped back and her hands gripped the man’s arm. His shot never came close to her, and he screamed as she twisted his arm into an awkward angle and slammed it with her elbow. His grip on the gun suddenly relaxed as his arm nearly bent the wrong direction and she quickly swatted it away.
Using his awkwardly held arm as a fulcrum, she spun the man so he was facing away from her, then grabbed his forehead and forced his head back, while her knee drove up into the back of his skull with a wet, sickening thud. She let him go, unconcerned if he was unconscious or dead from the blow. The other two men pointed their guns at her and fired. Carbon dropped low, both shots missing her entirely, and when she stood, the coal-black sword was in her hand.
She grinned inside her mask. Attempted murder of an officer, the penalty for both of Tucker’s henchman would likely be death. She kicked the table, sending it up into Tucker’s lap and distracting the men in the room. She ran in, blade leading. She swiped across at the man to Tucker’s right, then kicked him in the groin, then spun as the other fired at her. The bullet deflected off her backplate. As she completed the spin, she swung her sword up through his gun hand, then paused for a heartbeat. The man on her right stared in horror as gun fell apart in what was left of his hand, and the other fell back, not realizing until he hit the ground and blood started rushing around his collar that his throat had been slashed open.
The man with the gun was screaming and staring at his hand that was now missing three fingers and much of the palm. Tucker had pushed off the table and scrambled out of his chair, running into the main body of the meth lab. Carbon stalked around the fallen table. Without even glancing, she whipped a quick slash across the neck of the man with the mangled hand, ending his suffering as his head fell to the floor beside his body. The other thug gurgled and coughed as he bled out near the door. She picked up the briefcase, kicked the money back into it and then slapped it shut.
She heaved it at the running gun dealer with a vicious overhand throw. It struck his back hard and sent him sprawling on the ground. The people working in the lab had no loyalty to the man, and ran as fast as they could out the exits. Whichever one was supposed to be responsible for the gun was going to likely wind up tied to cinder blocks in the river; the large bag of firearms still sat on the counter. She paid them no heed, and bore down on her target. He was trying to get to his feet, his back spasming, several vertebrae likely cracked. He rolled over painfully when he heard the sound of her foot smashing a glass vial.
He drew a small caliber pistol from his belt and fired four shots at Carbon. Astonishingly, she maneuvered the large blade up, down then across, blocking three of the four rounds. The last one struck her in the seam between the chest plate and shoulder guard. She didn’t even flinch as the thin, flexible material underneath it absorbed the bulk of the impact. What little bruise she suffered would be fully healed in less than a minute. She glanced at her shoulder and then back at the grovelling rapist. The color drained from his face when he saw her eyes.
Mark Tucker threw the gun down. “Okay! Okay, I’m sorry! I’ll turn myself in! I’ll do it! Full confession! Just please, don’t kill me!” He could make out her narrowed eyes through the formed eye sockets in her mask. He saw no mercy, only judgement. His only opportunity had been missed. Carbon said nothing as her blade came up, and before he could finish the word “Please”, its perfect edge cut through his windpipe. She then drove the tip down through his thigh, severing his femoral artery.
While she typically killed quickly without malice, Carbon had seen enough of the aftermath of rapists to convince her they needed to suffer, at least for a while. Tucker gasped and writhed, the blood pouring out of his leg at frightening speed, his ruined throat preventing him from screaming or calling out for help. Carbon kicked over barrels of chemicals, filling the room with noxious, flammable fumes. Tucker was doused with several gallons of ether as it flowed past him.
The black clad vigilante strolled casually out the back door and climbed to the roof as if it was an afterthought, briefcase full of money in her hand. She leaped from the roof with the still unconscious guard in hand. She took his lighter and lit a wad of paper, then tossed it into the lab. A gagging scream, the last desperate cry Mark Tucker managed to scream, struggled out over the rush of flames. Carbon tossed the shotgun into the burning building, then dropped the guard into a nearby dumpster. In less than a minute the old strip mall was engulfed in flames, lighting up the City sky.
She didn’t bother taking the remaining crook to the police station; without due process, he would walk. She made quietly her way back to her apartment to get some sleep before she had to get up and investigate the meth lab fire and the murder of Mark Tucker.