by Charlie Wood
“You sure there’s no way you can put some rum in this?”
On the other side of the city, Keplar and Scatterbolt were sitting on the roof of the warehouse at Sullivan’s Wharf, bored. Keplar was looking over the horizon, mindlessly tossing some pebbles against a wall, while Scatterbolt had just finished telling Keplar the list of his favorite movies from Earth.
“Hey,” the robot said, “remember this?” His face suddenly went blank; his eyes turned black, and each of his pupils turned into tiny red dots. “Hello, Keplar,” he said, in a soft, monotone voice that sounded very much like the creepy, murderous robot HAL from the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Don’t you want to talk to me, Keplar?”
“No,” Keplar said, turning away. “I don’t. Knock it off.”
“Why, Keplar?” Scatterbolt said, using his bizarre HAL voice. “I just want to have a conversation with you.”
“Dude, stop,” Keplar replied, moving away from him. “You know that freaks me out.”
“I don’t know why.” Scatterbolt was still using his scary voice. “Do you like music?”
Keplar stood up. “Dude, I swear, if you start singing in that voice, I’m gonna throw you off this damn roof in two seconds.”
Scatterbolt’s face and eyes reverted back to normal. “Okay, okay,” he said in his usual voice. “I’m just so bored.”
Keplar walked to a skylight on the roof of the warehouse. “That’s what stakeouts are 90% of the time, SB,” the husky explained. “They’re boring. Nothing ever happens and we just sit here and—”
Keplar stopped. He saw something inside the warehouse. His eyes went wide.
“What is it?” Scatterbolt asked.
The robot walked to the skylight and looked down. Two people were now inside the warehouse: one of them was a man in a grey mask and a green-and-white costume, while the other man was nearly eight feet tall, wide as a rhino, and wearing a green cloak that covered his face and massive body.
Scatterbolt was shocked. “Is that...?”
Inside the warehouse, the man removed the hood from his face, revealing his red, rough skin, and his yellow eyes. It was Rigel.
“Yup, it is,” Keplar replied, watching the red-skinned giant. “And apparently he’s not dead.”
CHAPTER SIX
Back at the Grand Wellemore Hotel, Tobin had finally gotten over the embarrassment of his too-short pants and was now dancing with a group of his friends.
“See?” Chad said, as the song came to an end. “I knew if you just got out here and danced with us, you’d have some fun.”
“Yeah, well, the guy played ‘Don’t Stop Believin’, so I was legally required to make a fool out of myself.”
The next song began; it was a slow song from the 1960’s. The DJ spoke into the microphone.
“We’re gonna slow it down a bit right here to give ya’ll crazy kids a break, so why don’t you look around and find that special someone you wanna get a little bit closer with? This next one’s an oldie but a goodie that some of your teachers out there might remember.”
The teens began pairing up and slow dancing to the classic song. Tobin looked around the dance floor, searching for somebody.
He found her. Jennifer. His best friend since way back in seventh grade. She was standing all by herself. She smiled and waved at him.
Tobin smiled back and walked toward her, cocking one eyebrow and swaying with each step, acting like a hip, happening guy from the 1960’s. It was incredibly cheesy and looked completely ridiculous, but that was the point. Jennifer laughed. She always loved it when he acted silly like that.
“So,” Tobin said when he reached her. He motioned to his pants. “You like a guy in capris or what?”
Jennifer laughed. “Yes, I’ve been watching you for a while. I’ve never seen someone in tuxedo shorts dance like that to ‘Don’t Stop Believin’.’”
“Very few people have. So, what do ya say?” Tobin held out his hand. “A repeat of our first slow dance from the eighth grade winter semi-formal?”
“Oh,” Jennifer said, surprised. She was suddenly uncomfortable. “I, uh...I don’t know if we...”
Tommy Evans approached them.
“Hey, guys!” he said cheerfully. “Great song, huh? Shall we, Jen?”
Tommy took Jennifer by her waist and they began dancing. She put her arms on his shoulders. Tobin stood near them, unsure what to do.
“I’m sorry, Tobin,” Jennifer said, when she turned and faced him. “Next song, okay? I promise.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tobin said. “Sure. No problem.”
Tobin walked away.
“Hey!” Tommy called. “Tobin!”
Tobin turned around.
“Great pants!” Tommy said, laughing. “Seriously! You’re hilarious, man! I was just telling everyone how funny you are!”
Tobin did his best to nod and smile back, even though he was seething with anger.
“Thanks,” he said through gritted teeth. “Thanks, Tommy. You’re the best.”
On the roof of the warehouse at Sullivan’s Wharf, Keplar and Scatterbolt’s stakeout had just gotten a lot more serious. After the robot placed his hand on the glass skylight and pressed a series of buttons on a panel inside his arm, he and Keplar were able to hear everything that was happening inside the building through a speaker on the robot’s chest.
“What is going on in there?” Scatterbolt whispered.
Inside the warehouse, Rigel and Nova had been joined by dozens of other people—and not just any people: it was a gathering of the worst criminals in all of Boston: drug kingpins; the mafia; carjackers; muggers; even some men who looked like clean-cut Wall Street types. The various criminals were sitting in rows of chairs facing a makeshift stage, where Rigel and Nova were now standing. It seemed as if the two costumed super-villains were getting ready to address the group of criminals, but the presentation had not yet begun.
“Any idea what this is about?” one drug dealer asked another.
“You got me, man. Something big, that’s all I know.”
“I heard it had something to do with magic or super powers or something,” another thug added.
“Yeah, right.”
“Hey, that’s what I heard.”
“Can I have everyone’s attention,” Nova said from the stage, in a commanding voice.
The crowd of criminals turned to the grey-masked man in the white cape. Rigel was standing behind him.
“Thank you everyone for coming,” Nova said. “I know there’s a lot of rumors out there, and questions about why we’ve gathered you here, so let’s get right to it. We are here because we want you to join us.”
Snickering spread through the crowd, especially in the section where members of Boston’s most dangerous organized crime family were seated.
“Oh yeah?” one of them yelled out. “And who the hell are you?”
“My name is Nova. This is my associate Rigel. He organized this meeting, and is also the leader of our operation. We are not from your world.”
Several members of the audience laughed loudly.
“Yeah, sure,” the crime family member said. “And my name’s Gazoo, and this here is my friend E.T.”
The group of criminals laughed again, not taking any of the events seriously. Rigel grunted, growing impatient.
“I don’t believe any of you would be laughing if Strike was here, would you?” Nova asked.
“No,” a tattooed thug called out. “I’d be showing him how we do things here in the streets of Boston.”
Several members of the crowd cheered in agreement.
“That’s funny,” Nova said, “because he ‘showed you how things were done in the streets of Boston’ last month, didn’t he? Hung you upside down from a flagp
ole outside Fenway Park and threw about $300 worth of your cocaine into the Charles River? Is that about right?”
The criminals now laughed at the tattooed thug.
“Hey man,” the thug said to Nova. “You better watch yourself. You’re bringing up some stuff you don’t want to be bringing up.”
Nova waved his hands toward himself, motioning for the thug to come to the stage. “Why don’t you step up here for a moment. Come help us with our presentation. Bring a friend.”
The tattooed thug and his equally tattooed buddy stood up and hesitantly walked toward the stage.
“I’m going to be frank with you people,” Nova said. “You make me ill. I would like nothing more than to burn you all to cinders as you sit here in front of me. You—as a group—make me nearly as sick as Strike makes me. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Strike. He is a problem for us, and he is a problem for you. Which is the whole reason we are here.”
The crowd murmured—some in agreement, some with concern.
“Hey, if this is about taking out Strike,” a nicely dressed man said, “forget about it. I want nothing to do with that freak show. I’ve seen enough of my men end up in the hospital because of him already. No one’s gonna be able to stop that guy.”
“But you see,” Nova said, “that’s where you’re wrong.”
With inhuman speed, Nova reached out and grabbed the tattooed thug by his neck. The thug struggled for his life, with his eyes bulging and his fingers clawing at Nova’s arm.
“Hey man,” the other thug on stage said. “What the—”
Rigel grabbed the second thug and restrained him.
“Together we can stop Strike,” Nova said, tightening his grip on the tattooed thug’s neck. “We need to put aside our hatred of you, and you need to get over your suspicions of superpowers like us. We may come from the same world as Strike, and we may have powers like him, but that is where the similarities end.”
“So,” one of the crime family members said, “you’re looking to make some kind of deal?”
“Call it…an alliance.”
“And what do you get out of it?”
“Strike is in the way of what we want,” Nova said. “With him gone, we will be able to proceed. You will also get Strike out of your way, obviously, along with a little something else to help your various pursuits in the city of Boston.”
“Oh yeah?” the crime family member said. “What’s that?”
Behind Nova, Rigel grabbed a syringe from a table on stage. It was filled with a glowing, bubbling, red liquid. With a grunt, the red-skinned giant jammed the needle into the neck of the thug he was restraining.
“Hey, what’s that?” the thug yelled. “What are you—”
Rigel let go of the thug and threw him to the ground. The thug screamed out and curled over, grabbing his stomach. As he bellowed in agony and contorted his face, his body began to change. His muscles grew. His face was covered by brown fur. A single, long, white claw emerged from each of his forearms, looking like the blade of the Grim Reaper’s scimitar. As he stood, clawed hooves ripped through his boots, and his face transformed to that of a Minotaur of Greek myth.
The thug was now an enormous, destructive monster. After roaring and throwing out his clawed arms in anger, he reached for a run-down tow truck that was next to him on stage, lifted it over his head, and tossed it across the room.
The crowd—each one of them now standing—looked on in shock.
“You see,” Nova said, “you can get rid of Strike. You just need to even the playing field a bit.”
“This always works?” a nervous drug dealer asked. “It won’t kill us?”
“No. We’ve tried it on several low-level thugs already throughout the city with great success—you may have seen them on the news. Now we want to offer it to you, the most powerful criminals in Boston.”
“What if we refuse?” the drug dealer asked. “What if we don’t want this?”
Nova finally let go of the tattooed thug that he had been strangling. The thug dropped to the stage, grabbing at his throat and gasping.
Raising his arm, Nova held out his open hand toward the thug. The masked man’s palm began to glow with a golden light. The tattooed thug stared at the light, but before he could move, a blast of blinding, gold energy with the heat of the sun blasted out of Nova’s hand, searing through the tattooed thug. The crowd was momentarily blinded, but soon saw that the tattooed thug was now simply a pile of ash on the stage.
“Oh, I think you misunderstood,” Nova said, turning to the crowd, his hand still glowing. “You don’t have the option of refusing.”
The crowd was speechless.
“Any other questions?” Nova asked.
At the prom, Tobin was standing at the hotel bar and watching the dance floor as the slow song came to an end. The boy was trying not to be nosey, but his eyes kept drifting toward Jennifer and Tommy. When the song ended and all of the couples parted, Jennifer and Tommy shared a kiss.
Tobin was surprised. He watched as Jennifer and Tommy walked back to their table. Sighing, Tobin turned to the bartender.
“Hey, Steve, I’ll have another—”
Tobin’s eyes went wide. His adrenaline kicked in. Steve—the friendly bartender with whom Tobin had been talking all night—was suddenly stuck against the wall, with his body wrapped in grey spider-webs from his neck down to his feet, his arms pressed against his sides. His mouth was also gagged by the sticky, grey webbing, and his face was filled with horror, his eyes fixed on Tobin.
“Oh my god,” Tobin said.
Suddenly the banquet hall went dark—the electricity was turned off. The students screamed as they were plunged into pitch-blackness.
Tobin could not see anything in front of him as he looked around the banquet hall, and the shrieks from his classmates and chaperones only grew louder as someone—or something—began running through the dance floor, growling and snapping and knocking people out of its way.
The banquet hall dissolved into chaos, with the students fleeing from the dance floor and running toward the exit. Tobin, however, headed the opposite way, walking against the crowd and toward the DJ booth. But between the darkness and panicked mob of students, he could not make much headway.
Over the sounds of screams and trampling feet, the DJ’s voice was heard over the microphone.
“Hey, what the—aaaaahhhhaaah! Stop! Help! Help! Someone—”
A growling now came through the microphone, along with the agony-filled howls of the DJ. As Tobin finally made his way through the crowd, the lights came back on, and the boy found himself standing in front of the DJ booth. He looked up.
The DJ was hanging from the ceiling, dangling from a long spider-web, with his body also wrapped thousands of times over by the disgusting webs. He was still alive, thankfully, but a demonic Gore with eight arms was clinging to his body, with its fangs only inches from the DJ’s neck. Tobin was even more shocked to see a massive spider-web on the wall behind the Gore, with words written in the middle of it. The words read: THE DAYBREAKER IS COMING.
Gunshots and screams suddenly rang out, as several hotel security guards and police officers ran into the banquet hall and fired their guns at the Spider-Gore. The five-foot tall arachnid hissed at them before crawling onto the ceiling and skittering out a doorway, escaping into the halls of the hotel.
“What the hell was that?” a policemen said.
“Who’s gonna go find that thing?” a security guard asked.
Tobin stared at the gigantic spider-web on the wall in front of him, then dashed out of the banquet hall.
CHAPTER SEVEN
On the roof of the warehouse at Sullivan’s Wharf, Scatterbolt and Keplar were looking through the skylight and into the building.
“I can’t belie
ve this,” Scatterbolt whispered. “How is this happening?”
“I don’t know,” Keplar replied. “But we just gotta keep quiet for now and watch. See if we can find out what the hell they are planning.”
Inside the warehouse, the secret meeting was over, and the dozens of criminals were now waiting in a line that led to the stage. At the end of the line, Rigel was injecting each of them in their right shoulder with a syringe of red liquid. Within seconds of Rigel pushing the plunger, the criminals were granted their superpowers: some of them sprouted demon-like wings, some began to create ice from thin air, some began to levitate, and some were granted super-speed. Many of the criminals were transformed into completely inhuman beasts—one man turned into a seven-foot tall, black-scaled dragon with barbs running down his back, while a group of six others became impish goblins, with long fangs and two extra arms.
On the roof of the warehouse, Scatterbolt walked away from the window and to the edge of the building.
“We gotta go tell Orion.”
Keplar was lying on the skylight and peering inside. “And just leave these things here?”
“Yeah! What are we gonna do, take them all on by ourselves?”
With his back against the glass, Keplar turned to Scatterbolt. “I guess you’re right. Krandor. This is really, really bad.”
“I know. I’m just glad none of them saw us.”
Keplar nodded and exhaled. Then there was a CRACK!
“What was that?” Scatterbolt asked.
“I don’t know.”
Another CRACK!
“I hope it wasn’t…”
Keplar turned over and looked at the skylight underneath him. A crack was running across it.
“Uh-oh,” the dog said.
SMASH! The skylight shattered and Keplar fell into the Sullivan’s Wharf warehouse. Shocked, Scatterbolt stared at the broken window.