by Rob Rogers
The Omega struggled against him then, and the Behemoth could feel one of his own arms jerk out of the socket. He screamed. The Behemoth had never been hurt like that, never met anyone stronger than he was. The pain was incredible. He held on.
Horodenski didn’t hesitate then. He rushed forward, jammed the muzzle of the shotgun into the hole in the Omega’s throat and pulled the trigger.
There was a deafening roar as the shot split the barrel of the gun. Horodenski cried out as bits of shot bounced back and burned their way into his arm and chest and throat.
The Omega stood stock still for a second, seemingly unmoved by the blast. Then he slumped in the Behemoth’s grip. “Oh, God,” he said. Then the Behemoth could see little cracks appearing all around the Omega’s body, like he was turning into a jigsaw puzzle. The cracks began to glow with a harsh white light. “Oh, God,” the Omega said again.
And then he exploded.
The Omega had once been a normal man, the Behemoth had read. A Navy SEAL He’d been exposed to . . . something—the government never let anyone find out what—and he’d become . . . something more. And now that something, that energy, exploded out of him as he burst into a mess of blood, tissue, and liquid light. It sprayed over the area and showered the assembled freaks of Ma’s Spectacular Amusements traveling carnival.
The Behemoth, who’d been holding the man, caught the brunt of the blast. It knocked him backward fifteen yards, and lights pulsed in front of his eyes. His whole body burned. But the pain ebbed quickly, even the pain from the dislocated shoulder, and he pulled himself back to his feet to the sound of screams of terror and agony.
Frank Horodenski writhed on the ground, his breath coming in little panting sounds as though he didn’t even have the strength to scream. He’d been standing in front of the Omega and had probably been hit with nearly as much of the explosion as the Behemoth had. He looked liked he’d been flayed. His clothes and hair had burned right off. His skin was blackened. It bubbled and popped like the surface of boiling water.
Hector Poteete was on fire. He sat in the middle of the road, flames skittering up and down his arms, sparking out of his hair. It didn’t seem to bother him. He stared at the orange-red flames in mute fascination, a mesmerized smile on his face.
Errando the Wolf-Boy lay on his side, his body warping. One moment, he looked like himself, then his body stretched and writhed, and a wolf lay there, howling. Then he shifted again into some hybrid of wolf and man, with long fangs and claws. Then he looked for all the world like a normal boy, not a freak at all, hairless except for his head and his eyebrows, his face smooth. The cycle kept repeating over and over while Errando whimpered.
Sasha Crozier was on her hands and knees crying in huge, ragged sobs, rocking back and forth. As the Behemoth watched her, her back arched. She shook, and it seemed for a moment that she was jutting her shoulder blades out. But then the sequined leotard ripped open and something crawled out of her back like a worm writhing free. Two somethings, because a second one popped out almost immediately. They looked liked roots at first, jutting out of her back, twisting this way and that as she tried to scream. But then the Behemoth saw flat gray feathers growing out of the roots. Wings. She was growing wings.
The explosion had knocked the two rear trucks on their sides. The Behemoth walked toward the middle truck in long strides, looking for Bernice, but the fat woman had been crushed under her own handicap ramp. Her dead eyes stared at the stars above and blood trickled from her mouth.
The truck in the back, the one Stecker had been driving, was just as bad. Bitzie the Pinhead and Lorana the Mule-Faced Girl lay dead in each other’s arms, jagged pieces of glass and metal from the truck peppered throughout their bodies. Stecker sat next to them, screaming in numb horror, his arms and legs flopping and stretching to more than twice their normal length. His hair had fallen out and his skin had turned green and scaly. Wide-eyed, he reached out to the Behemoth, but his aim was off and his hand stretched a good ten feet past the tattooed man. The Behemoth shook his head unsympathetically and walked away.
He passed the winged Sasha and the shifting wolf-boy, stepping around Frank Horodenski, who was still panting and writhing. He walked to the truck he had been driving and then, sighing with trepidation, bent down to turn the side mirror so that he could examine himself. The first thing he noticed wasn’t his reflection, but the fact that his fingers now ended in huge claws at least six inches long. He had grown taller, too. He could tell that just by comparing his height to the truck. He was about ten feet tall now, stronger and more muscular. In the reflection he could see that he’d grown more monstrous than ever. His face was harsher, the nose flatter. His bottom canine teeth jutted out of his lower jaw like upside-down walrus tusks. He grunted, then crushed the mirror in his huge hands. Nuggets of silvered glass fell to the road like stardust.
The Behemoth turned and stepped over Horodenski, who just didn’t seem to know when to die. He walked over to Poteete, who blinked up at him, the flames that had been covering his body suddenly sluicing away. The Behemoth made a sweeping gesture with his arm, taking in all of the carnage. “So what do you think?” he said. “Will we still get paid for disposing of the body?”
Sonic-Burst Doctor Camelot
Team Leader and Heroic Armored Warrior
10” action figure
· Three sound effects and flashing light simulate sonic-burst action
· Twist figure for piston-backed punch
· Glow-in-the-dark chest emblem, faceplate, and jet pack
Re-create the greatest battles of the Storm Raiders with Sonic-Burst Doctor Camelot and other Storm Raiders action figures, sold separately. A portion of all proceeds from Officially Licensed Storm Raiders products are donated to the Vanguard City Children’s Hospital.
— Excerpted from a Storm Raiders action figure box, twenty-two years ago
Chapter Five
Vanguard City, Connecticut
Early April, twenty-two years ago
In a month known for showers, the day dawned crisp and clear, the sky a vibrant blue. A nest of robins was chirping in the front yard and someone was mowing a yard nearby, the scent of fresh-cut grass floating through the neighborhood. Twelve-year-old Katie Brauer hated it all. Her father was dead. The skies should be weeping. The color should have leached out of the world. The air should reek of ozone and tears.
The black-haired girl sat on the kitchen window ledge, staring at the linoleum floor but not really seeing it. Friends and family had gathered. They’d brought food. Lots of it. There were chocolate chip cookies, slices of ham, and a tuna casserole with those little potato sticks on top. Uncle Rinji had even brought a plate of something called sushi. There was more than Katie and her mother could ever possibly eat, assuming they ever discovered their appetites again. She wished they’d take the food away. She wished they’d leave.
She wished her mother would turn the damned television off.
Some superhero had died. Doctor Camelot. So what? Her father had died, too, but the television stations didn’t care about a design engineer who’d had a brain aneurism while working late at his office one night. They didn’t care about his lopsided smile and the hint of Old Spice in the air around him. They cared about the superhero who’d flown through the air in his shiny high-tech armor and who had fallen in battle against some sort of super-powered criminal team of monsters and freaks.
The television droned on . . .
“Vanguard City, of course, was named after the first known superhero,” said a professor being interviewed by a blonde newswoman in a navy power suit. “The American patriot Roscoe Clay, who was said to have the strength of three men, donned a black mask and fought against the British during the Revolutionary War. He was christened ‘Vanguard’ by General Washington himself.”
Katie knew all about Vanguard. She and her classmates had toured his historic home back in October. She’d been surprised at how short his bed was, how low the ceilings of tho
se old buildings had been. Clay had been a goldsmith by trade, and there were two huge anvils on display in his garden. The docent giving the tour had told them that Vanguard could lift both anvils over his head without straining. He’d hidden his face not so much to keep his incredible strength a secret, but to hide the depth of his hatred for the British. His father-in-law was a British colonel, and by feigning sympathy for the redcoats’ point of view, he gained important information that he was able to exploit as Vanguard. No one knew exactly how Roscoe Clay had come to be so strong, but after America gained its independence, a few other people with extraordinary abilities had gravitated to the town—rechristened Vanguard City in 1784 by Governor Jonathan Trumbull—and it became a sort of crucible for free thought, artistic expression, and scientific development.
“How you doing, kid?” Katie’s Uncle Samuel sat next to her on the ledge, then tentatively took her hand. He wasn’t really her uncle, no more than Uncle Rinji was. Several close friends of Katie’s parents were aunts and uncles to her. Uncle Samuel wore a charcoal gray suit and a dark blue tie. His eyes were red, and Katie realized with some surprise that they were level with hers—he was just about her height of five feet.
She gave him a shy smile and shrugged. “I guess not very well.”
He nodded, unsurprised. She thought for a moment that he was going to say something, but he merely patted her hand and remained sitting there, his feet with their shiny black shoes dangling near the floor like a little boy’s. They made a soft clump-clump sound when they tapped against the ledge wall.
The newswoman was narrating now as a montage of images rolled past on the screen.
“This Doctor Camelot was believed to be the third person to bear that name. The first became active in Vanguard City in 1940, a—quote—mystery man who sported a flowing cape, a signature metallic shield, a British accent, and a sword reported to have been able to slice through steel. That Doctor Camelot, whose real name was never revealed, retired publicly in 1953, shortly after his long-time adversary, the Red Plague, fell to his death during a battle atop Caperton Tower.”
Katie glared at the television. “Why won’t she turn the TV off?” she whispered. “I don’t care about Doctor Camelot. I care about Dad.”
Uncle Samuel smiled thinly at her. “It’s helping her, Katie. It’s helping distract her and it’s—it’s helping her see that good people are respected.”
She sniffed and wiped back a tear. “Doctor Camelot wasn’t any better than my dad, you know.”
Uncle Samuel nodded slowly. “You’re right. He wasn’t.” He patted his pockets as if looking for a handkerchief to give her, came up empty, stood and fetched her a napkin from the kitchen table. Sitting beside her again, he said, “Your father was a brave and amazingly intelligent man. I was proud to—” He broke off. “Proud to call him my friend.”
He had been about to say something different, Katie realized. “How did you meet Dad?” she asked.
He blinked. He looked around the room for a moment, then turned back to her. “We were friends from college,” he said vaguely.
“You went to MIT, too?” Katie wanted to go to MIT when she was old enough.
He blinked again. “Um, no. No, I went to Iowa. We just met back then, is all.” He turned uncomfortably toward the television and Katie found herself doing the same.
The newswoman had moved past the career of the second Doctor Camelot and was starting in on the most recent one. While the first and second Doctor Camelots had carried various equipment in their wars against villainy, the third wore a high-tech armored suit—powered armor, they called it—that allowed him to fly, carried a variety of nonlethal weapons, and protected him from harm. That was until he fought the freaks calling themselves the Cirque d’Obscurité, or the Circus of Darkness, and a giant tattooed monster man calling himself the Behemoth had broken his neck.
The television showed footage of Doctor Camelot with Vanguard City’s own Storm Raiders, one of America’s most popular and effective superhero teams. His armor glistened in the sunlight like chrome, a violet cape—presumably pure decoration—fluttering out behind him in a gust of wind. He didn’t carry a sword and shield like his predecessors, but he had a coat of arms emblazoned on his chest that bore tribute to them.
At the time of his death, he was the leader of the Storm Raiders, an impressive group of talented and powerful superheroes. The roster included the dashing acrobat Swashbuckler; Raiden, flying wielder of electricity; Sam Small, the six-inch man; Patriot, a strikingly tall woman who was reportedly bulletproof; Velociraptor, the saurian man, and Miss Chance, who claimed to wield “luck magic” to help her allies and bedevil her enemies. Other members joined and left from time to time, but those were the seven who had been captured on film that day in front of the gold-tinted windows of the Kunke Exchange Bank Building, smiling happily after having won a fierce battle with Deadlock. On the television, they gathered around Doctor Camelot, one by one reaching out to touch him or pat his armor in some way, their faces filled with obvious pride and affection for their daring leader. During that battle, the newswoman related, Doctor Camelot had dived between Deadlock—a half-mad genius cyborg said to be able to bend titanium in his bare hands—and a suddenly trapped Swashbuckler and Sam Small, saving their lives at the risk of his own.
When Katie looked at Uncle Samuel again, she saw that his eyes were glistening with tears. “It will be all right,” she said impulsively, drawn now somehow to comfort the man. Her stomach clenched with a pain that she felt would probably never go away. Her father was gone. “It will be all right,” she said again. The air around them was empty.
The privileged of Devil’s Cape see its beauty. The graceful replica pirate ships that circle each other in Mississippi Sound during the springtime, loaded with bejeweled partygoers, rum, and maybe a little fine Columbian blow. The tall, pillared mansions surrounding Bullocq Park, their eaves corded with wisteria. The dark, smoky opera house, which to this day contains an entire floor where the sight of a black man is as rare as an eclipse. They feel a sense of entitlement. But the children of the disenfranchised and working poor, the ones growing up in forgotten holes in the city like Crabb’s Lament, those kids don’t see the beauty. They spend days staring at gray. Gray dust. Gray concrete. Gray futures.
— From “Cemented by Strife: The Rise of the Concrete Executioners,” by Russell Hakes, Devil’s Cape Advocate Monthly
Chapter Six
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Mid-August, twenty-two years ago
The sun made the pavement almost unbearably hot, but Cain Ducett sat barefoot anyway, his dark feet almost as black as the asphalt of the street. He had a sloppy oyster po’boy in one hand, the mayonnaise and relish and paprika dripping onto the sidewalk and steaming. He’d take a bite of the po’boy, then lower it, raise his other hand, take a hit from the joint he had cradled there, and then return to the sandwich. He had an open thermos filled with ice, RC Cola, and Jim Beam cradled between his legs, but he wasn’t touching it just then, just letting the cool air waft up out of it.
5-D Binoe crouched behind him, squatting on a jam box that was pulsing with music, leaning forward every time Cain exhaled after popping the joint, trying to suck up what he could from the surrounding air. 5-D was fat and stank, with sweat hung up in pouches of his dark skin, a little bit oozing free whenever he moved. Six fat inches of paunch protruded at the bottom of his shirt, revealing a round, pink, puckered scar where Cain had gut-shot him the summer before for taking a handful of quarters out of Cain’s money jar. 5-D had worn a colostomy bag for nine months, but he was proud of the scar and had followed Cain around like a damn puppy dog ever since. He had a 9 mm stuck in his oversized jeans, and every time he leaned forward to suck the smoke near Cain, he stroked the gun and made a high-pitched “Ooh, ooh” sound in a little girl’s voice. Cain was damned if he was going to share a thing with him—not his sandwich, not his joint, not his drink.
Cain glanced up to
see Jessica “Jazz” Rydland sidling down the street, a newspaper under one pale arm that never seemed to tan no matter how much sun she got. Her blonde hair damp with sweat and muggy Louisiana air, she bent down in front of Cain, making a show as her white T-top opened a little bit in front, and slowly pulled the cold thermos out from between his legs. She drank languidly, and let half a mouthful of the sweet, sticky drink dribble down her chin.
5-D said, “Ooh, ooh” again and lifted a fat arm to swipe his forehead.
Stamping out his joint, Cain reached forward and took the thermos back from her, plucking out an ice cube and drawing it across each cheek like he was applying war paint. He popped the cube in his mouth and crunched hard. “What you doing here, Jazz?” he asked. He stuck the thermos back between his legs.
Smiling, she pulled the thermos back out again, even more slowly, her eyes on his. She had ice-blue eyes, very pale skin, and very white teeth. “Just reading the paper,” she said. She flicked it open for him, leaning close and holding it open. It was a supermarket tabloid and the lead story was about the “Devil Baby of Dubai.”
“Why do you read that garbage?” he asked.
“There’s half a world you know nothing about, Cain Ducett.” Jazz liked to claim that she was a voodoo priestess. Cain would mock her about it, talking about her “white voodoo” and calling her a sham.
He stared at the photo of the devil baby, an obvious fake with horns and a pointed tail. “I know enough,” he said.
She sat the thermos back down in his lap, dropped the paper on top of it, and leaned further toward him, staring in interest at his face and massaging his dark shoulders. “Do you, now?” she asked. “You know the street, Cain. You know pain and drugs and violence.” Her hair was almost in his face. “You don’t know much else.”
