Concorde, his helmet cracked open just enough to be heard, grunts thoughtfully. “Well. This certainly makes things tricky.”
“Tricky? Yeah, don’t oversell it or anything,” Matt says.
Concorde waves his hand, calling for silence. He folds his arms, bows his head. We all know that posture well: he’s thinking, analyzing — assessing the situation, our capabilities, our liabilities, the variables, the best and worst options available. We give the guy a lot of grief for his prickly personality, but no one will deny the fact that Concorde, when it comes to strategies, is the sharpest mind among us.
“Quantum, I need your eidetic memory. Where is our target from here?”
“The nexus was located on Winter Island, almost on top of the remains of Fort Pickering,” Doc Quantum says. “Follow this road north for approximately a half-mile, take the first right, follow the road onto the island, take the left fork after the entrance.”
“Kunoichi, you got all that?”
“Um...yes?” Missy says. Concorde makes her repeat the directions, because she’s our advance scout. Find Black Betty, make visual contact, relay information to Sara, stay out of sight, and above all, do not engage the target without backup.
I turn to wish her good luck, but she’s already gone, vanished into the night. I never heard her leave.
“Kilowatt, you’re staying with the Raptor to watch Meg and Farley,” Concorde says. Kilowatt opens his mouth to argue. “Your powers are not useful in this situation. Your sister is incapacitated, and your baby brother is here. They need to be guarded. If we manage to kill the Luddite Field, get the Raptor airborne, locate the targets, and unload with the scramblers. Until then, you’re here.”
Kilowatt nods grudgingly. “Yes, sir.”
“The rest of us, we’re on foot, so let’s move it out. Quantum, you and I are on the sidelines, advisory roles only unless circumstances dictate otherwise. No one is to attack until we hear back from Kunoichi. Lightstorm, Enigma, if we need an emergency first strike, you’re it. Move in fast, hit hard.”
“Got it,” I say. “You have my back, Astrid?”
She doesn’t respond, and for good reason: she’s gone.
Son of a —
The stars should be out.
The sky is cloudless; the moon is new, cloaked in the Earth’s shadow; the blackout means there are no lights to wash out the heavens; yet there is nothing above her but blank, black night. The stars have abandoned her. Missy muffles a tiny, discomfited whine.
She pauses again, as she has every few steps along the long, narrow road leading to the island — pauses to look and to listen, to scan her surroundings for any sign of an ambush, wondering whether her heightened senses are sufficient to warn her of a magical assault, fearing they are not up to the task.
More worrisome is the strange itch at the base of her skull, a very real, almost painful tingle that has worsened with every step. She never knew such an itch before, not before a demon ambushed her, body and soul, and tore away a small piece of her when it left. She’s felt the itch a few times after that day. She felt it in Newburyport. She felt it in Gloucester.
She feels it every time she’s near Astrid.
A built-in demon detector, she decides, would be more useful if it did not make her want to claw out the back of her head.
Missy skirts the edge of the road as it leads her to a parking lot, a vast and empty plain of asphalt that has taken on the distinct chalky pallor that settles on New England roads every winter. A stiff wind sweeps over the lot, carrying with it a whisper, barely audible over the gentle rustling of Missy’s shinobi shōzoku — the soft drone of many voices speaking as one.
Pressing low to the ground, she crawls down a side path, her hands and feet silent against the gravel beneath them. She slips in and out of the low brush flanking the path, slinks ever closer to the source of the chanting. A high stone wall set into a low hill, a remnant of the 17th Century military fort that once occupied this spit of land, rises up on her left. The peak provides her with a clear look at an expanse of open field below, and her eyes easily penetrate the moonless gloom. Eight people, their arms outstretched, heads tilted toward the sky, form a circle. A ninth figure, robed and hooded — dressed appropriately for the occasion, Missy thinks — stands in the center.
Sara, I’m on the island and there’s a bunch of people here and they’re all weird and chanty and stuff.
I see them Muppet, Sara replies, stealing a glance through Missy’s eyes. Stay put and keep your head down. We’ll be there in —
Several hundred feet away, Sara echoes Missy’s startled yelp as the sandy soil erupts, spraying the acolytes with earthen shrapnel. They collapse, thrashing and wailing in agony, yet their robed leader remains untouched.
“BLACK BETTY!” Astrid’s voice rolls like thunder across the field, but, unlike Missy, Astrid does not cower in the name of stealth. She hovers over the fallen acolytes, looming, threatening to rain destruction down on her enemy. Glowing energy pours from her hands, begging for release.
“Black Betty? You mean her?” The robed man says, indicating one of the writhing forms on the ground, a woman in a black leather catsuit. He turns toward Astrid, pushes his hood away. Missy can’t see his face, but she thinks it must be a horrifying sight indeed to cause Astrid to stagger back, her mouth agape. The twin auroras swirling around her fists flicker and fade.
“Hello, Astrid,” the man says. “What? No hugs for Daddy?”
THIRTY-ONE
Remember when Stacy Hellfire went apehouse in Kingsport, and I had the bright idea of chatting her up instead of blowing her into next week? Yeah, I’m not letting that happen again. Never let the bad guys talk.
I come in low, strafing the ground. My blasts nail Obi-Wan Kenobi and send him sprawling. I swing around as he jumps to his feet, like I never touched him, so I touch him again, harder. Much harder.
I hear Astrid somewhere behind me, screaming at me, screaming my name, but I’m not listening to her. She broke ranks. She abandoned us. She’s not part of the team anymore.
The robed man gets up again, shakes his head, and laughs at me. Laugh this off, jerk.
He laughs it off. My second-strongest blast, he takes it square in the chest, goes spinning head over heels across the field, and he rolls right back onto his feet. The smile never leaves his face.
Two options: crank the volume up to eleven and hit him full-force, which could splatter him all over Salem; or throw some heat on it and flash-fry him. Either way, I’m faced with the very real prospect that I’m about to kill a man.
I can’t do it. The whole world is at stake, and I can’t do it.
My hesitation almost costs me. The man gestures, whipping up a short, powerful burst of wind — a focused pocket of turbulence — that knocks me from the air. I manage to catch myself at the last minute, avoiding a painful faceplant, but everything’s spinning.
I’m a proverbial sitting duck, but I’m also a convenient distraction; Missy hits the man from behind, raking his back. That, he feels. Muppet, I don’t know why you’re having better luck than I am, but keep it up.
She does. Missy lays into the man, a buzzsaw of claws and fists and feet. It’s savage and terrible, but I’m not about to stop her. Besides, it looks like I have other concerns, because the guy’s buddies are getting to their feet. Nine against two.
No, I guess it’s nine against three; Astrid throws lightning into the group, nailing one of them. The rest scatter, moving to surround us. That’s right, keep your eyes on us. Pay no attention to the super-cavalry coming to the rescue.
Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to say all hell breaks loose. Stuart, a cricket bat-wielding Matt, Nina Nitro, and Rockjaw Quantum hit the sorcerers like a miniature avalanche, while the psionics hang back to cover Concorde and Doc Quantum. Astrid and I join in, blasting at anything threatening, and Missy sticks to their mysterious leader guy like Velcro. None of the bad guys can get a shot off.
It takes us seconds to herd the bad guys together. The acolytes diligently surround their master, who is leaking blood from dozens — hundreds of gashes.
He’s still smiling.
“It’s over,” Astrid says.
“Oh, honey,” the man chuckles. He wipes the blood out of his eyes and (ew, gross) sucks it off his fingers. “You’ve been hanging out with super-heroes too long.”
“Maybe not long enough.”
He shrugs. “I’m not complaining. Actually, I’m glad you brought your friends with you. I need them for the ritual.”
Cued by a snap of his fingers, the sorcerers draw daggers with long, wavy blades. “Oh, please,” Astrid says. “You think you can take us down with those? We’re not about to become your blood sacrifices.”
The man’s grin widens. It sends a chill down my spine.
“You’re not the sacrifices, dear,” he says. “You’re the witnesses.”
It all happens too fast. The man raises a fist. His lackeys mirror him — and, judging by Black Betty’s shocked expression, not voluntarily. He drops his fist. The acolytes do likewise. They utter choked screams. They collapse.
Never let the bad guys talk.
Black Betty, the light fading from her eyes, hisses, “Bastard...you used me...”
“Evil,” the man says. “Duh.”
We stand there in stunned silence. We entered this fight not knowing what to expect, but this, none of us saw this coming.
You know what else we didn’t see coming? The spreading pools of the acolytes’ blood bursting into angry red flames. The heat, as strong as a blast furnace, forces us back. It consumes the sorcerers’ bodies, reducing them to horrific charcoal sculptures in a matter of seconds, then scorches the ground, turns it to smoldering ash that reeks of sulfur.
The robed man stands in the middle of it all, untouched.
“Astrid!” Nina shouts. “What the hell is happening?”
“Yes,” the man responds. “Hell is happening.”
Every time I think this cannot possibly get worse, it gets worse — and yet, I can’t help but tell myself this is it, we’ve reached the summit of Crap Mountain, nowhere else to go.
That’s when the barbecued corpses stand up.
Missy’s shriek damn near pops my eardrums. “Astrid you said there were no such things as zombies but those’re zombies but they’re so much worse because they’re flaming zombies!”
“Are these things dead or alive?” Rockjaw asks.
“Dead!” Astrid says. “Definitely dead!”
“Good.” He flattens one, bringing his open hand down as though crushing a bug. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stay crushed; the thing reforms immediately, rebuilding itself from the ash.
“Astrid! I would really love an explanation!” I say.
“I wish I had one! I don’t know how, but it’s the Dismal Realms! He’s bringing the Dismal Realms into our reality!”
Oh, Crap Mountain, you do keep growing — along with the patch of scorched soil, which has doubled in size since the spell activated.
“Can you reverse it?”
“...Maybe. If I can figure it out.”
This trend of self-proclaimed experts coming up short at critical moments? Do not like.
“Trencher, Enigma, fall back!” I say. “We need you and the big brains to figure out the mechanics, fast!”
“The mechanics?” Matt says. “I don’t —”
“Just go!”
They clear out, retreating to the parking lot. The rest of us shift positions to fill the gaps. The charcoal zombies counter. The master of ceremonies, the man in the robe, he stands in the center of it all.
“I can’t wait to see this. My friends?” he says. The charcoal zombies crouch, preparing to charge. “Crush them.”
“What is this?” Concorde asks, though he suspects no explanation could adequately clarify the situation.
“I don’t know, exactly,” Astrid says. “If I had to guess, I’d say a dimensional transit spell, but that’s never been more than magical theory.”
“A what what spell?”
“Dimensional transit spell. It causes two realities to overlap. It’s supposed to act as a bridge between dimensions, but I’ve never heard of such a ritual actually working — and if I don’t know how it works, I can’t reverse it.”
“Then figure out how it works!”
“Please do so quickly,” Mindforce says. “I don’t know how long the others can hold off those...things.”
“Or how much longer we have until the entire island is deep fried. Look,” Sara says as the flames cross over into the parking lot, bringing the asphalt to a rapid boil.
“Are you sure that’s what’s happening?” Matt says. “Are you absolutely sure?”
“No, I’m not, but I don’t know what else it could be.”
“If this spell were tearing a hole in the barrier between realities, wouldn’t the psionics be puking their guts out again?”
“Come on, Matt, what are you thinking?” Concorde says.
“Point one: all evidence suggests the spell is not establishing a rift between worlds. Point two: Astrid insists we’re standing in the presence of the Dismal Realms. Hypothesis: the spell is converting the matter of our world; it’s turning our reality into the Dismal Realms, or something like it.”
“Demonic terraforming?”
“Pretty cool, huh?”
“Not really, no.”
“Next question: how do we stop it?” Doc Quantum says.
“The fire seems to be the means of conversion,” Matt says, “so put out the fire.”
“It’s hellfire,” Astrid says, “you can’t just put it out.”
“Why not? It’s in our universe, which means it follows our rules. Fire needs fuel and oxygen. Take away one or the other, it goes out.”
“And how do you suggest we do that?” Doc Quantum says. “Unfortunately, we have an abundance of both.”
“Trust me, Charlie,” Matt says, “I got an angle.”
I wish the brains would hurry up and be brilliant, because this is turning into the losingest of losing fights.
The battle zone is surrounded by a raging wall of fire that continues to grow in intensity, fueled by acres of trees and winter-dried brush (not that hellfire is at all discriminating about what it incinerates). It’s slow to burn out, but where it has, there’s nothing left but blackened earth. The field has become enemy territory, and the charcoal zombies are benefitting from the home court advantage, big time, reforming as fast as we can destroy them. A cloud of ash, kicked up by the fight, hovers low over the land like fog, sickening us with its stench, obscuring our vision; the haze reduces the combatants to vague silhouettes, and if it weren’t for the fact the zombies glow like logs in a fireplace, I’d have nothing to target.
Unfortunately, the host of this party doesn’t glow; I never see his attack coming.
A bolt of blue lightning lances up from the ground. My aura takes the brunt of it, or so I assume; I can’t imagine this could hurt any more without killing me. I fall and land hard, the impact driving the breath from me. I gasp for air, but get a lungful of foul ash instead. I dry-heave so hard my eyeballs threaten to pop out of their sockets.
“Poor little stargirl.” I flop onto my back to see the robed man looming over me, blue arc fire crackling around his fingers. He’s going to go Emperor Palpatine on my helpless butt, and I can’t stop him.
He doesn’t make a sound. He doesn’t scream, doesn’t cry out, doesn’t utter so much as an annoyed grunt, as the Entity — the freaking Entity — melts out of the shadows and, with a single swift, graceful movement, snaps the robed man’s neck.
“I don’t want to ever again hear you people complain I’m not around when you need me,” the Entity says. I cough and wheeze in response. “If you’re trying to thank me, don’t bother. I don’t want your grati
tude.”
I’m not trying to thank him. I’m trying to warn him that the man he killed is being very stubborn about not dying, and is about to return the spine-breaking compliment. Dammit, lungs, work with me!
Oh, hey, right: I don’t need lungs.
I power up, and the burning sensation in my chest vanishes. I let the robed man have a little taste of my pain, blasting him for all I’m worth. At this point, I doubt a full-intensity zap will do much more than piss him off for a few seconds, but man, it feels good to unload.
“Don’t bother to thank me, either,” I say to the Entity.
“Hrm,” he says.
Clear out! Mindforce shouts in my head. Full evac, now!
I reach out to grab the Entity, to pull him out with me, but he pulls his freaky vanishing act. Jeez, between him and Astrid...
Wherever he went, I hope he didn’t miss Mindforce’s follow-up message, which spells out what’s going to happen next, and he definitely does not want to be at ground zero when the big brains execute their plan.
One second into the countdown, I feel the air pressure drop. Three seconds later, I’m airborne, and high enough that I can see the full extent of the spell’s damage. The fire is eating away at the island with terrifying speed, and at this rate, Winter Island will be a wasteland within minutes — and unless this plan works, the mainland is next. If the island went up this fast, what would happen if hellfire starts eating cars filled with gasoline, homes with tanks of heating oil, or anything connected to a natural gas line? The entire city is basically a gigantic bomb, and Winter Island is the fuse.
Five seconds. I’m out over the ocean, well out of the danger zone (I hope). The island is a torch in the night, spewing noxious smoke they’re probably smelling all the way in Maine. The air pressure shifts. My God, all the way out here, I can feel the change.
I understand the basic concept of Matt’s plan. Fire needs fuel and oxygen in order to burn. Depriving it of fuel, that being the ground itself, is impractical, if not impossible, but taking away its air...
Action Figures - Issue Two: Black Magic Women Page 23