by James Maxey
“He was crazy, you know,” said Kidd.
“I can’t say that I know that,” said Law. “But I do know one thing. I’ve tasted what you can do with meat.”
Kidd shrugged, looking modest.
Law licked his lips, tasting the memory. “No fair man could judge it a crime.”
Where Their Worm Dieth Not
ATOMAHAWK TOOK A PACK of unfiltered camels from his utility belt and popped a fresh cigarette between his lips. His fingertip glowed like a miniature sun as he lit it. Acrid smoke curled toward Retaliator.
Retaliator, squatting on the edge of the roof of the vacant factory, said nothing as he stared down at the docks of the darkened warehouse. It was two in the morning; it had been at least twenty minutes since the last goon had furtively slipped inside. Despite Retaliator’s focused silence, something in his posture must have changed imperceptibly.
“What?” said Atomahawk, sounding defensive.
“What what?” Retaliator answered, keeping his voice gravelly and neutral, still not looking at his long-time ally.
“You flinched when I lit up,” said Atomahawk. “You’ve got a problem with my smoking?”
“I’m not here to pass judgment,” said Retaliator, who recognized the irony of the statement. The whole reason he was a crime-fighter was that he was willing to judge people. This was why he spent nights skulking dark alleys in dangerous parts of town rather than drinking brandy by the fireplace in his mansion. He was well-known for his ability to see things clearly, in black in white, cutting through the haze of gray fog that afflicted so many of his fellow men. He sighed.
“A: Lighting your cigarette with your powers is about as stealthy as waving around a road flare. B: Kids look up to the Law Legion and you’re the most powerful member. If they see you smoking, they’ll think it’s okay. C: You’re my friend, John. You deserve a better death than lung cancer.”
Atomahawk nodded as he hovered closer to the roof’s edge. John Naiche was a full-blooded Apache who looked quite striking in his bright-red plastisteel armor. His long black hair flowed like a cape down his back. He’d been a founding member of the Law Legion along with Retaliator, Arc, She-Devil and Tempo. The big Apache took a long draw on the cigarette, then flicked it away.
He crossed his arms and said, “You know I took it up again right after your last funeral.”
“Again?” asked Retaliator.
Atomahawk furrowed his brow, puzzled by the query. Unlike Retaliator, he wore no mask to hide his features, only war paint that looked like swept-back hawk’s wings.
“You said ‘again,’” said Retaliator. “It implies you used to smoke before.”
“Oh,” said Atomahawk. “Yeah. In high-school. I quit when I joined the marines. But for the last ten years, any time I get stressed out, I can’t help but think about putting a cigarette in my mouth. The last time Prime Mover killed you, I bummed one from a teenager outside the funeral home. I haven’t been able to stop. Honestly, why should I worry? My blood is more radioactive than uranium. I have to bury my feces in lead jars because they’d kill any ordinary man that got near them. Cancer’s coming, but it’s the radiation that will do me in, not cigarettes.”
Retaliator struggled not to roll his eyes. He’d heard Atomahawk’s my-power-is-my-curse shtick often enough he could recite it by rote.
A long moment of silence passed as they both stared at the warehouse.
Atomahawk said, “Anyway, I’m not the most powerful Legionnaire anymore. She-Devil’s scary now that she’s eaten Satan’s heart. And Golden Victory could probably take me in a fight, if it came to it.”
“I could take you in a fight,” said Retaliator. “It doesn’t change the fact that kids look up to you.”
“You dress like a refugee from a bondage flick,” said Atomahawk. “Don’t lecture me about corrupting children. How’s Nubile doing, by the way?”
Retaliator pressed his lips together tightly. “She’s off the respirator,” he said softly, losing the deep raspy baritone he normally affected. “The doctor’s say . . . they say she might recover more brain function in time. It’s still too early to know.”
“That’s good,” said Atomahawk, in a tone that meant, “That sucks.”
Retaliator stood up, stretching his back. He tugged up his leather pants, which had slipped down a bit. Perhaps he did look a bit like a bondage fanatic in his black leather pants, knee high boots with about a hundred silver buckles, leather gloves that laced up his forearms, and a black mask that concealed all his features save for zippered slits at the eyes, mouth, and nostrils. His shaved chest was completely bare, showing off the hundreds of scars he’d acquired over twenty years of crime-fighting. His skin wasn’t bullet-proof, but his entire cardio-vascular system was composed of high-tech bio-plastics from the 28th century that few 21st century weapons could damage.
His outfit, he knew, made some people uncomfortable. But they’d been the clothes his father, Reinhart Gray, former chief justice of the Supreme Court, had been found dead in. Police had ruled his death accidental, saying he was the victim of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Eric Gray had become the Retaliator in order to solve the mystery of his father’s murder, a quest for justice that still drove him twenty years later. Wearing his father’s clothes wasn’t a sexual statement. It was, instead, a warning to the unknown murderer, a reminder that there was one man, at least, who still remembered his crime.
“Here comes Casper,” said Atomahawk.
“Don’t call him that,” growled Retaliator.
The ethereal form of Witness floated toward the roof. Witness was really Chang Williams, the ghost of a twelve-year-old conjoined twin whose now-separated brother was currently trapped in a coma. Chang’s spirit was trapped on earth, unseen by all save for the few souls who’d been to the other side and returned. Since nearly all the members of the Law Legion had died at one point or another, they’d recently adopted the ghost-child and given him a new life as Witness, an invisible, intangible spy who could gather information in the most dangerous environments without risk to himself.
Witness floated before them, completely naked, since souls have no need for clothes. It was politically incorrect to call conjoined twins Siamese, yet, Chang was, in fact, from Thailand, formerly known as Siam, though he’d been raised in America. He was thin, almost girlish, having died before puberty, with skin the color of a walnut shell; his dark eyes had no irises as he stared at Retaliator and said, “There are a dozen men inside. They frighten me. I can’t touch them.”
“You can’t touch anybody,” said Atomahawk.
Witness reached out and placed his skinny fingers onto the Apache’s boot. The big man gave a small yelp and jerked his foot away. “What the hell was that?”
“You should read the dossiers. Witness has a graveyard touch,” growled Retaliator. “He can brush against anyone’s soul and make them feel the mortal chill of their own guilt.”
“So, what, the men in that warehouse have no souls?” asked Atomahawk.
“They’ve signed Prime Mover’s contract,” said Retaliator, with a sigh. “Another dozen lost to the God Clock.”
“They’re well armed,” said Witness. “Assault rifles and fancy-looking pistols. They’ve got cases of C4 in the back of the warehouse. Also, five or six small helicopters. At least I think they’re helicopters; they don’t have rotors attached. They’re planning to blow something up, but no one said what.”
“The Supreme Court,” said Retaliator.
“Is this anything more than a guess?” said Atomahawk.
“Tomorrow is when they’re hearing arguments on Prime Mover’s appeals. They’re being asked to decide if a murder conviction can stand if the victim is later restored to life by a time-travel paradox.”
“Even if he gets off on that technicality, he’s guilty of hundreds of other murders,” said Atomahawk. “He’s not going to walk. And why blow up a hearing that might lead to a ruling in his favor?”
“It’s too big of a coincidenc
e that his goons are stocking up on explosives. Security is going to be high tomorrow. He would blow the place up just to prove he still runs the world, even from a prison cell.”
“Is he that crazy?”
“Maybe,” said Retaliator. “Or maybe the guy rotting in prison isn’t the real Prime Mover. When they put him in jail, Prime Mover claimed he was a cop named Jason Reid who’d somehow been put into Prime Mover’s body. An hour later, though, he was back to normal. Assuming normal is the right word for a man who believes he’s God.”
“You’re taking the idea he can swap his soul into other bodies seriously?” asked Atomahawk.
“I’m talking to the ghost of a Siamese twin and an Indian with a fusion reactor where his heart should be,” said Retaliator. “I’m not in a position to dismiss anything as impossible.”
Atomahawk nodded toward the warehouse. “We going to do this thing?”
“Go,” said Retaliator. “Make it loud.”
Retaliator jumped onto his zip line and slid down to the dumpsters behind the warehouse as Atomahawk blazed through the night sky like a comet. He landed on the dumpster as a thunderous crack came from the front of the warehouse. The ground shook as the steel door near the dumpster blew from its hinges, a victim of the rapid change in air pressure inside the building as Atomahawk blasted through the front doors.
Retaliator’s muscles tensed. He toyed with the closed switchblade in his palm. Any second, at least one of the goons would make the sensible decision to flee. That would be Retaliator’s cue to drag him into the dumpster and have a few private moments during which he would make the goon tell everything he knew about Prime Mover’s plans.
The seconds passed in odd silence. Normally by now hired muscle would be shooting at Atomahawk, not believing in his well-documented invulnerability. Nothing short of an anti-space grenade was going to hurt Atomahawk, and Retaliator was certain that he was in possession of the last of the five prototype grenades built before Professor Novy had died.
A full minute went by. Someone stuck his head out of the door. It was Atomahawk.
“You should take a look at this,” he said.
Retaliator jumped from the dumpster and looked into the warehouse.
The vast space was well lit by a few atomaflares drifting in the air. The warehouse was completely empty. There weren’t even any cobwebs.
“I’ve scanned all spectrums. Nothing is hiding invisibly. There’s chaotic heat residue from people who were here, but I’m afraid I wiped out any useful IR information with the blast that took out the front doors.”
“I swear they were here two minutes ago,” said Witness, who’d joined them.
Retaliator sighed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose through his mask. “Prime Mover must have activated another power of the God Clock. Teleportation? Time Travel?”
“She-Devil might know the next power,” said Atomahawk. “She was around when they built the Antikythera mechanism.”
“Go to DC,” said Retaliator. “Keep an eye on the courthouse.”
“They aren’t going to let me anywhere near the building,” said Atomahawk.
“That’s why you have a secret identity,” said Retaliator.
“I’m six-foot five, I don’t wear a mask, and I set off Geiger counters from twenty feet away,” said Atomahawk. “My secret identity isn’t as useful as yours, rich boy.”
“Figure out something,” said Retaliator.
Witness said, “It’s no problem for me to get in. I’ll contact you the second I spot anything suspicious.” He faded from sight, back into the ghoststream.
Atomahawk lifted into the air. “It might not be him,” he said.
“It’s always him,” said Retaliator. “Every time I think Prime Mover is finished, he comes back stronger than ever.”
“Lucky thing for the world you’re always waiting for him,” said Atomahawk.
“Yeah,” said Retaliator as he leaned against the dumpster, his shoulders sagging.
“What?” asked Atomahawk, pausing twenty feet up.
“What what?” asked Retaliator.
“You look so down. This isn’t like you.”
Retaliator reached back and unzipped his mask. He tugged it off, letting the chill November night cool his sweaty hair. “How do you know it’s not like me? What makes you think you know anything about me?”
“I’ve watched you die three times and seen you get married twice,” said Atomahawk with a wry smile. “I’ve literally been to hell and back with you, man. If I don’t know you, who does?”
Retaliator scratched the callus on his neck left by the mask. “So what was it about my last funeral?”
“That made me start smoking again?” said Atomahawk.
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “The first time we thought you were dead, it was right after the Snarthling invasion. Half of the Law Legion still had alien duplicates running around, so it wasn’t a big surprise when we pulled the real you out of the goo-coffin on that captured saucer. The second time, of course, we both died when Dr. Novy blasted us with the anti-space grenades, and we were too busy fighting our way out of hell for me to get stressed out. But the third time you died . . . I thought it had really happened. We didn’t know you’d been pulled into the twenty-eighth century by Fan Boy, and that the corpse we buried was only a matter-balancing time-echo. It felt final. I should have known it wasn’t. We Law Legionnaires never stay dead.”
“Or the villains,” said Retaliator, shaking his head wearily. “I’ve seen Prime Mover get torn apart by alligators. I’ve watched him fall from planes, get run over by a tank, get shot by his own henchman, and decapitated by a helicopter. I get a few months of something almost like peace . . . then he’s back again. It never ends.”
“People come back,” said Atomahawk. “It’s a crazy world.”
“My father didn’t come back,” said Retaliator. “Amelia didn’t come back.”
Atomahawk’s face fell. He said, apologetically, “I didn’t mention the weddings to—”
“Torture me?” said Retaliator. Not a day went by when thoughts of his shattered lovers didn’t haunt him. His first wife, Amelia, had taken too many sleeping pills; she’d found out the truth of his second life and never learned to cope with the stress of knowing where her husband really spent his nights. His second wife had known the truth, of course. When Nubile had joined the Law Legion she told everyone she was nineteen, although, in truth, she was fourteen, exactly half Retaliator’s age at the time. She’d passed as older due to her shape-shifting. Fortunately, the first four years they’d fought side-by-side, their relationship had never advanced past teasing flirtation. When they’d finally taken off their masks and progressed to the next phase, Retaliator was no longer technically a pedophile.
“I’m not trying to torture anyone,” said Atomahawk. “Don’t let events bring you down, is all I’m saying. We’re fighting the good fight. A war can’t be judged by a single battle.”
“Get to DC,” said Retaliator, pulling his mask back on. “We’ve got work to do. I’m going to talk to She-Devil.”
* * *
As Atomahawk vanished into the night sky, Retaliator walked to the nearest manhole cover. “Going to talk to She-Devil” was both the easiest and the hardest thing in the world. She-Devil claimed to be Uruk, a five-thousand-year-old woman who’d met Satan in Mesopotamia and broken his heart after a torrid love affair. As a result, he’d cursed her with eternal life and his own duty of punishing the souls of the wicked. But, save for her inability to die, he hadn’t given her any special powers to carry out her mission. Thus, she’d started her career constantly drawn to confront the wickedest men on earth without any true power to harm them. Her first thousand years had been hellish, as she’d fallen again and again into the hands of men so vile and depraved they made Genghis Khan look well-adjusted. Unfortunately for Satan, he’d underestimated the human ability to adapt. Angels and demons were created knowing everything they would ever
know. They had little capacity to learn. Humans, on the other hand, improved with age. As the centuries went by, Uruk became nearly unbeatable in hand to hand combat, and eventually mastered the mystic arts as well.
Arc and Tempo had a conspiracy theory that She-Devil had formed the Law Legion specifically so that they could all be killed by Dr. Novy and sent to hell to serve as allies in her final battle with Satan. It was too much for Retaliator to think about, to be honest. Before the Law Legion, his career had consisted of beating up muggers and drug-dealers. It was easy to make the judgment that a man peddling junk to school kids deserved to have his teeth pounded from his mouth. Moral clarity became more difficult when he was called upon to judge alien bureaucrats, time-traveling machine-men, and anti-matter refugees from the seventh dimension.
Retaliator rolled aside the manhole cover and beamed his flashlight down into the darkness. Below him was nothing but the muck of a storm drain. He leapt, pulling his arms in as he dropped through the hole. He landed, not in knee-deep water, but in a large cavern lit by the reddish glow of the lava river that bisected it. This was the Devil Cave, filled with memorabilia gathered over five millennia of adventures. The place looked like a graveyard for props from a thousand B-movies. He jumped across the lava river and approached the golden throne. Supposedly, Midas himself had used this chair.
“I know you’re here,” said Retaliator. “I couldn’t be here if you weren’t.”
“I was just waiting for you to say ‘hello,’” a woman’s voice answered behind him.
“Hello,” he said, turning around.
Retaliator was a tall man at 6’3”, but She-Devil was at least a head taller, and taller still if you counted the long black horns curving up from her brow. Her skin was red; not American flag-stripe red like Atomahawk’s armor, but blood-red. A pair of leathery wings jutted from her shoulders. She wore armor made from black scales of the dragon she’d slain when they’d escaped hell together.
“What brings you here, Eric?” Her voice was disturbingly normal coming from a black-lipped mouth with white fangs flashing within. She sounded like a gray-haired librarian from Kansas, not an immortal vanquisher of evil. She was also the only one of the Law Legion to ever call him by his first name.