This equivalent of a directional tingling sensation, as if he was extracting information directly from the etheric firmament of some vast universal database, proved on target when he reached the designated area of the complex.
There the rookie hero saw a quartet of young men, each of whom appeared between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, pushing a smaller boy in their age group against a side of the tenement’s wall. Centurion well understood how painful the ridged stone and mortar of those tenements felt to a mere mortal who was shoved against it.
The sight of that enraged him to the core of his metahuman being, and the powerful Odic energies which now saturated his cellular enclaves began involuntarily surging. His eyes took on their fearsome azure glow as these energies leaked out of his ocular sockets. This luminescence only intensified as memories of the abuse he himself had taken all too often from such individuals began cascading through his mind, much like a series of crude cel animation pages being rapidly flipped through.
Control yourself, Benny, he reminded himself firmly. Accordingly, he struggled to keep his disturbed emotional state and inner rage at bay. Still, sparks of cerulean-hued energy began sizzling around his tightly clenched fists like a swarm of electromagnetic mayflies cavorting over a bluish-hued lamp.
“Let him go,” the young hero-in-training commanded. “Or deal with someone who can actually fight back, not to mention annihilate all four of you.” Geeze, that sounded corny. I need to work on my threats.
“Who in the hell is this?” the tallest gangmember wondered aloud.
“Dunno, he ain’t wearing any colors I recognize,” said his shorter but bulkier partner-in-terror. “Or any kinda outfit I recognize either. But he makes demands of us in our territory. No one does that.”
Attempting his best Michael Keaton imitation, the monochrome-clad metahuman gladly answered the question of the first gang member as to his identity: “I’m Centurion.”
The stares of incredulity he garnered in response prompted him to follow that statement up with, “And let me give you fair warning that I can—and will—hurt you badly if you don’t release the boy, pack your bags, and move out of this city faster than it took any of your fathers to conceive you. Which I imagine was probably less than a minute.”
The tallest of the four hooligans whom Centurion now fully recognized sniggered loudly. “We’re the State Boys, bro. This territory is ours. This little freak was trespassing, just like you are. But he wasn’t stupid enough to insult our fathers. So, we’re gonna make a bigger example out of you. You’re gonna bleed like it’s comin’ out of a hose, man.”
The thug pulled out a retractable switchblade and extended the shiny, razor sharp knife hidden within. He rushed towards Centurion like a cat lunging at an unwary grounded bird, his mouth practically frothing in anticipation of the blood he planned to spill.
Though his training had only recently begun, the young metahuman’s reflexes were superhumanly keen, and he easily evaded the slashing blade directed at his throat.
Centurion then instinctively swung his fist in backhanded fashion, moving with such swiftness his arm appeared almost a blur to the human eye. The back of his fist struck the youthful gangbanger in the side of the face, cracking his facial bones from the cheek to the jaw and sending him flying backwards over two dozen feet.
“Holy shit, man!” exclaimed a heavy-set member of the now truncated quartet. “He must be one of those metahumans! Like that Ultimus dude! You’re still dead, bitch!”
Centurion found himself genuinely taken aback when the young gang member quickly brandished a concealed firearm. This was an eventuality he failed to consider.
“Waste ‘im!” the burly gangbanger shouted.
At this command a shot was fired. Centurion now instantly realized the vast emotional difference between watching a gun pointed at someone on TV and actually having this happen in real life.
Thus, the rookie hero failed to dodge the bullet that was fired at him, and the lead projectile struck him directly in the gut from a few feet away. The impact of the small metallic object carried a force akin to what he always imagined a mule kick to the lower abdomen would feel like.
“Gods, I’ve… been shot,” Centurion choked to himself as he grabbed his stomach area with both hands and fell to his knees.
“Aaahh Jesus!” the gang’s young victim screamed. “You shot him! You shot him!”
The gun-wielding gangbanger then turned the weapon to the direction of the screaming young man who was still at their mercy. “Shut ‘yo smooth little ass before I put the next one right in ‘yo family jewels.”
This brief distraction was all it took for Centurion to realize that while he felt the painful wallop of the bullet, it didn’t penetrate his skin. No hole was evident in his bio-mimetic costume either, which added further validation to this. No blood could be seen despite his expectation that his hands and the ground directly beneath him would be stained a wet crimson.
Within a moment, his state of shock was replaced by a build-up of anger even greater than that which he felt during his recent encounter with Jeff Wolfe and Mickey Judge.
“You shot meeeeeee!” he bellowed while reflexively extending his arm in the direction of the gunman and summoning the powerful energies his atomic structure was now saturated with.
A searing bolt of sapphire-tinted energy was projected from his cupped hand at the man holding the firearm. The now terror-stricken gang member managed to barely dodge via his street-honed reflexes. That move didn’t enable him to escape the effects of the beam unscathed, however.
The bolt of energy hit the brownish surface of the Shoreline tenement just to the side of the remaining trio of gangbangers and their hapless victim. The mortar that was struck exploded outward, spraying the general vicinity with numerous chunks of rocky shrapnel.
The stone debris projected from the damaged infrastructure ripped the skin of both the gun-wielding gang member and the gang’s victim in several places. Neither were fatally injured, but both screamed as they hit the ground due to the sizable degree of skin they each had torn from their bodies.
A third member of this party of State Boys, who stood to the left of both, was similarly flogged by debris. This one, however, was more seriously injured when a particularly large shard of mortar smashed into his face, pulverizing his nose into a mass of dripping gore. No scream was emitted from him upon being struck; just a deep sound reminiscent of someone attempting to forcibly vomit before his body met the ground.
In the meantime, the gun-wielding thug laid on his stomach screaming and writhing his extremities like a deranged break dancer. Numerous small shards of mortar were embedded into the tough leather jacket of his back and the denim covering his buttocks, penetrating the clothing and flesh underneath. After coming to a semblance of his senses, he began reaching for his dropped firearm, which now laid a few feet from him.
The still infuriated Centurion was not about to let him retrieve the weapon for another shot, though. That is when something quite unusual happened.
Resulting from a combination of rage and instinct, a pair of twin yellowish beams were unexpectedly projected from Centurion’s eyes. These beams focused on the firearm, causing it to burn white hot within seconds of contact.
When the gangbanger grabbed the now shimmering white firearm, he hollered in extreme pain as the skin on his fingers literally cooked upon touching the super-heated metallic surface of the gun. Numerous pus-filled boils became visible on his now deeply red appendages.
Centurion’s continuing pain and rage prevented him from fully acknowledging the previously un-manifested use of his power he had just displayed, however. Instead, the livid metahuman rushed towards the final standing gang member, grabbed him by the scruff of his jacket, and hoisted him off the ground with ridiculous ease.
“Easy, man! I can get y’all a good deal on some really good stuff…!”
But Centurion wasn’t listening. Instead, he simply flung the gang membe
r up against the still intact portion of the stone-ridged tenement. He could hear the youth’s ribs and possibly some of his vertebrae crack upon the impact. A trickle of blood dribbled down the side of his mouth as he slumped to the grass unmoving.
“Oh, my gods, what did I just do?” the hero-in-training said to himself while literally shaking with recriminations. “I lost it again. The guy I was trying to help was injured. No no no, this is not how the first outing of a super-hero is supposed to go. It never happens like this in the comic books.”
Centurion rushed towards the fallen bodies before him to see to their condition. He first tended to the boy whom he tried to save from the gang. The young victim was shuddering in pain and shock, the only words leaving his mouth forming a repetitious series of statements alluding to how much pain he was in.
“I’m so sorry…” Centurion said with an overwhelming level of remorse.
The youthful superhuman suddenly became determined to attempt using the Odic energies for healing. He placed his palm on the injured boy’s chest and concentrated on building an entirely different frequency of energy. It pulsated with gentler but still intense rhythms, and he let it pour in flowing streams directly from his hand and into the victim’s cellular structure.
This type of energy manifested as a slightly lighter hue of blue luminescence, akin to the sky on a sunny cloudless day. Though it caused no further damage, it didn’t seem to have any beneficial effect either. At least, none that were readily discernible. The injured boy merely seemed to gasp a bit louder as his chest took on an eerie blueish incandescence for a few moments.
Centurion finally gave up, after which he pulled out the special cell phone the Institute had given him. It was a device that sent out texts and calls along a private and heavily encrypted satellite receiver, and he used it to summon an ambulance.
Knowing that the rescue vehicle would be along soon, he fled the area and headed back towards the neighborhood where the Institute was located. The adolescent hero lacked any inclination to speak to the police, whom he knew would doubtless also be arriving; and he felt he had already sufficiently apprised the EMT dispatcher of the situation despite the haste he felt was necessary.
Centurion quickly headed back towards the Institute, intending to sneak back in with no one the wiser. However, as he moved within one block of the hidden location, the young man caught sight of something that made him wonder if having confronted the police would have been easier to face.
It was none other than a very irate-looking Donovan Jakes, with two fully geared up Institute security guards flanking him.
“Benjamin,” the lead agent said with a scathing deep voice. “Come with us. Now.”
“Oh crap…” were the only words that the would-be hero’s larynx could form.
Chapter 14: Year of the Cat
Tabatha ‘Tabbie’ Morales was used to running away. She had been doing so since she was a wee lass of eleven, and at this point in her young life—the age of fourteen—she was no stranger to living on the streets. They were as much home to her by now as the interior of any particular house, no matter who its owners may have been.
Never, however, did she expect her life on the streets to take the turn it would once she was exposed to the local Warp Event when its otherworldly energies blanketed the Buffalo area in a moment of intense fiery blue candela. Her rapidly fading human thoughts recalled how she was squatting in a Lower West Side back alley to relieve herself when the strange flash suddenly seemed to envelop the entire world for a brief two seconds.
Her personal world was to be immediately altered in a most nightmarish manner.
At first, Tabbie bid this eerie light little attention due to its extreme brevity. She likewise attributed the strange images that filled her mind during the light show to be the result of hunger-induced hallucinations, or something like that.
But within several seconds of exposure to this mysterious light, she first noticed the intense itching sensation over every inch of her skin. She scratched until she made herself bleed in several places even more intensely than the deliberate cutting she used to inflict upon her mocha-colored skin as a means of venting her feelings of anger and lack of control over her life.
Within an hour she began seeing the beginning of the strange hairs emerging from her outer dermis. They appeared first in the sections of skin on her arms that she cut open with her incessant scratching. This process grew more pronounced over the following two hours as her nails grew longer and sharper, and the light ochre-colored but smooth hair began covering more and more of her body.
By the middle of the evening, she was so uncomfortable in her clothing that she tore much of it off, shredding it with her now talon-like nails as if it were paper. Tabbie then realized her body had become almost entirely hirsute, with a covering of hair that much more resembled the smooth coat of fur which belonged to a cat than anything human. The light ochre coat had many darker stripes running through it.
Upon seeing this, Tabbie attempted to scream, “Oh my God!” in Spanish, but the words instead came out resembling a scratchy, barely intelligible string of sounds.
The freakishly transformed young girl then felt the urge to seek cover. To that end, she began darting about with a degree of speed the best athletes in her former school’s cross country team couldn’t match. Accompanying her lithe movements was a display of agility greatly surpassing any feat she or her co-players on her old middle school gymnastics team had ever accomplished. The color imagery which her visual acuity was accustomed began being rapidly replaced with dull but vibrant patterns of heat.
The girl’s initial terror and revulsion at what she had become, along with the startling confusion over the myriad scents that began assailing her olfactory senses, were quickly replaced with far more simple thoughts and feelings. These included a sense of oneness with the urban streets and back alleys that she now considered not merely a home, but her territory.
These feelings of possessiveness towards the back alleys in her claimed vicinity led to extreme anger directed towards anyone or anything that dared to enter what she felt to be her rightful domain. This feeling was primal, and nothing her formerly human mind could ever conceive of or relate to.
A few days later, mailman Ernesto Gutierrez was to be the first unfortunate individual to inadvertently cross into Tabbie’s newly claimed territory. This occurred in the earliest hour of his usual route, as he walked past an alley on Budd Street.
As he did so, Ernesto heard an intense and rather disturbing sound that resembled an animal ravenously eating a moist fruit. His curiosity being piqued, the mail deliverer stepped slowly into the garbage-encrusted contours of the narrow passage between two abandoned houses from which the sound appeared to have originated. The courier then adjusted his vision to see what he at first took to be a large ochre-colored dog tearing away at the flesh of a smaller dog that to his eyes was most likely a terrier.
It was when this creature looked up that Ernesto suddenly observed, to his unremitting horror, that it was no large breed of dog he was looking at but something human-shaped. Its slim bodily contours suggested a female, which appeared even more terrifyingly clear to him when he saw that the upper abdomen of this creature appeared to have two rows of four small breasts.
The face of this creature vaguely made him think “human” … but only vaguely. Her protruding ears were pointed upwards; the nose was small, hairless, and tan; her eyes, greenish with a horizontal slit denoting the iris; and her razor-sharp teeth were gluttonously devouring the innards of her slaughtered prey. The latter of which turned out to be, on this closer inspection, not a small breed of canine but a large rat.
Upon having her meal interrupted by this interloper, the female creature gracefully but frighteningly jumped to two feet in a crouched position, and then pulled back a set of thick red lips to bare her blood-covered incisors. She emitted a dry hissing growl of clear and present hostility that chilled the reliable mail-deliverer right down t
o the marrow of his bones. He screamed in terror and fled the alley.
But the roughly humanoid animal that was once Tabbie Morales would forgive no such intrusion on her domain by one of those fragile hair-deficient creatures that infested the urban landscape she called home. The newly transformed Tabbie couldn’t kill them all, or even most of them, but she would gladly make exceptions for those who directly invaded whatever alley or other space served as her personal sanctuary at any given time.
Ernesto ran impressively fast for a mere human, but he couldn’t outrun the thing that Tabbie had become. She dashed with an odd but effective ever-changing combo of bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion that overcame the man’s panicked sprint within seconds.
The girl-beast leaped upon his back and tore clear through the material of his uniform, ripping deep into the muscle of his flesh. Ernesto screamed in agony and even more terror as he realized that he was now paralyzed since his bestial pursuer dug into his spinal cord and severed numerous key nerves along the way. Before he could regain any semblance of his senses, the she-predator had torn several chunks of his buttocks and legs from his body.
Though members of the species she used to belong to weren’t Tabbie’s usual prey of choice, she found the meat taken from them to be pleasant enough to her palate. And despite the abundance of rodents and a fair supply of stray dogs to serve as her primary food source, the former Morales girl would never refuse any good meat from another source that opportunistically came to her attention.
***
When the EMT’s pulled Ernesto Gutierrez into the ambulance, he was barely alive and most definitely not intact. Tabbie didn’t leave much flesh and skin on his lower extremities. Worse, the man had lost even more blood than flesh. As he was hauled into the rescue vehicle to be rushed to the hospital, the victim of the she-creature’s ghastly predation drifted into and out of consciousness; during the brief and tortured moments when he was awake, only two words left his mouth.
Centurion- Dark Genesis Page 16
