by J. B. Garner
"Then who, dammit?"
"Reaper."
My blood chilled as I saw a hole the side of several floors suddenly explode out of the side of the Bank of America Plaza. No one would be so insane as to think they could control something so evil, so insane, and so deadly. Unless they felt they had no choice. Even then, was it he who took down the dome? I wasn't so sure.
Not that it mattered as we rushed through the sky. The military was bad enough, but they ostensibly wouldn't fire on civilians. Reaper, though, was a butcher. The world's most powerful Pushcrook, Reaper was literally the evil opposite of Epic, with all the same nigh-omnipotence and not even the faintest shred of morality to hold him back. Even more horrible was that the mortal man at the core of the beast was an innocent.
Gerald Schuller was mentally disturbed and Reaper was that other personality buried in him. That personality was normally kept in check with anti-psychotic drugs but all it would take to bring back the beast was for someone to deny Gerald his medication. Maybe they had made a deal with Reaper, freedom for this one task. I still couldn't fathom the pure liquid crazy it would take for someone to think that was a good idea.
"Faster!" was the only word I had to offer.
Chapter 22 Death
We rocketed across the skyline. It struck me as queer that I was here alongside Eric and not down below with the flood of Push Heroes I saw emerge from the battered Capitol. Just like with normal humans, imminent disaster could bring the separate factions of the Pushed together in a moment's notice. I wasn't sure why I had the chill in my spine or the tingle at the base of my neck. We had beaten Reaper before, we could do it again.
Rational Irene brought up facts that I wanted to ignore. This time, he knew what I could do. This time, Epic was far weaker than before. This time, we had a force of maybe two dozen instead of the majority of the world's heroes, even if they hadn't all directly fought him. This time, there were innocents as far as the eye could see. No partitions, no separations enforced by the government.
I forced all of that down. It wouldn't help and there wasn't any more time for my fears. Epic swooped down and joined into the superhuman flock that rushed into the Plaza building, as chunks already started to crumble from the grievous damage inflicted on its side. The scene inside the blasted-out hollow was no less savage than the ragged hole we flew through.
The initial blast, certainly from the outside in, left a rough, semi-circular hole in the building itself. Three floors of space had been vaporized including, certainly, any Crusaders or affiliates who had been working in that space. Among the rubble of the remaining floors, I could hear groans of the injured and dying.
Floating in the middle of that space, Reaper, just as impressive as he looked before, floated in mid-air. Huge and powerful, he was very much the opposite number of Epic, save for his garb of black, crimson, and bronze. Gerald Schuller, his unwilling host, was ensconced in the middle, this time completely unconscious. That sight alone sent new alarms going off in my brain.
In his hands, neck turned entirely the wrong way, was a colorfully costumed figure, garbed in the red, white, and blue of the American flag. Easily recognized from the nightly news, it was Colonel Liberty, the U.S. Army's poster boy for Pushed recruitment. Whatever powers he had were unimportant because he was very, very dead. So much for any chance of military intervention or oversight. Compounding our problems was that Reaper was not alone.
I had read about this kind of thing certainly in my cramming through Eric's comic-book collection. Strangely I wondered where that collection had gone to. This thing was the common 'a threatened government does something extreme to counter the superhuman threat', but it was an important and insane subset where the government picks the worst crazies to be that counter.
Not only was Reaper there but he had a small cadre of Pushcrooks with him. I recognized the undead coal miner I had fought during the Battle of Washington (the '49er, I heard him called later) and a particularly infamous anarchist known as Dischord (misspelled for effect), garbed head to foot as a heavy metal queen, complete with face paint and spiked shoulder pads. There were more and they all triggered something in my mental database of literally the worst of the worst in the Pushcrook community. It was like Reaper got to handpick his squad of killers. Hell, maybe he did.
"Ah, I see the principle players have finally joined onto the stage," Reaper grinned insanely. "Even my favorite boy and girl." He gestured grandly towards Epic and myself as he dropped the lifeless corpse in his hands. "I had been, until a few moments ago, serving my country in the fight against terrorism, but I think we'd all rather just engage in it ourselves."
"Where's the crystal girl?" I shouted above the din. This round of cliche-enforced chatter would end in a moment. I'd better take advantage of it. "How did you take down the dome?"
"I don't know, but if she's a friend of yours, trust me, we'll get to her in good time," Dischord wailed. Even without using her destructive sonic song, her voice was like nails on a chalkboard.
"As for the dome, well, you should ask whoever opened the door for us," Reaper smirked. "Now, can we get down to the fighting before I start murdering office workers?"
God bless Archer, because an exploding crossbow bolt was the answer he provided to Reaper's question. It didn't hurt the physical god, but it did shut him up. Really, though, there weren't any more words to be said between the two sides. Not after the indiscriminate death laid out before us.
To be honest, I couldn't pick out the battle cries of the two sides as they clashed into one another. It was one terrible cacophony. Even if we won and we beat Reaper, what would be left to dissuade the U.S. Army from finishing what they started with him?
Epic's very first thought apparently was to throw the rock I was standing on straight for Reaper's head. I leaped free the moment the acceleration lurched forward. A good thing, too, as Reaper reduced the marble to so much dust with a lance of crimson energy before rocketing towards Epic. Eric was going to get creamed and, with no need to maintain radio silence, I flicked on my long-dormant com as I landed on one of the unstable floors.
"Epic is still in bad shape, guys," I urgently said as I hopped over a desk, sliding out of the line of fire as a sonic burst evaporated the ground where I was standing. "If you can, support him. The rest of these guys are dangerous but Reaper's the big target."
"You heard the lady," Ex extolled. I could see his ice slide spiral up through the hollowed part of the building, laying out indiscriminate blasts of ice, no doubt to make people duck their heads. "We've done this before; we can do it again." That sounded awful familiar. I just hoped he didn't get into the rest of my line of thinking or it would turn from pep talk to doom talk really quick.
Off the desk, I ducked then tumbled as the Hood, a walking, talking poster for the Ku Klux Klan, swung a rather scary looking scythe through the air, literally burning white flames in the air behind its arc. Each figure I picked out just made me more disgusted with the military's choices. Really though, I thought as I drove a palm into what I suspected was the racist's nose, it only showed just how pushed to the wall the government was. They had no other choices, most likely. It was either this or a nuke. Looking at it that way, I wasn't surprised.
I grunted as the Hood, blood leaking through the white, caught me off-guard with a flame-wrapped haft to the gut. The fire didn't hurt, but the impact was going to leave a bruise. However, it was nowhere near enough to stop me. Snarling, I grabbed the scythe and ripped it out of the thug's clutches and planted a stomping kick to his chest. As he flew away, tumbling over a shattered cubicle, I snapped the scythe over my knee. Enough kidding around.
A quick glance told me that the Reaper dog pile was underway and it was not going well. Epic was already laid out, groaning in a pile of rubble by a far wall. Gaslight's swarm of clockwork robots had been broken into so much dust and even the most accurate shots that Battalion and the Argent Archer could lay down had about zero effect. Reaper let out an evil chuc
kle as he turned, seeing me unoccupied.
"The rest of you gnats keep biting, I have a real problem to deal with."
In a blink of an eye, even faster than my reflexes could adjust for, he was there, looming. He lashed out with a lazy backhand that I easily dodged, but it was just a tiger playing with its toy. My mind was racing, trying to figure all of this out. How could Reaper even be manifesting with Schuller unconscious? Maybe he wasn't. Maybe it was -
"You see, I know how to deal with you," Reaper smirked as he snapped his fingers. The clatter of every decent sized object in the area rising up into the air broke my train of thought, compounded by the rumble of the coal-encrusted miner coming up behind me. "I mean, Epic figured it out, I'm just following his playbook."
With that, everything in a hundred foot radius that wasn't nailed down flew at me in a storm of death.
Of course, the problem for Reaper was that I had plenty of friends and they really liked the fact I was still breathing. As I flinched from the expected impact, there was no pain. Not a single object blasted into me. I opened an eye a slit to see, through what little light filtered in from the mass of objects, that some invisible force had blunted the assault on me. Mind's Eye no doubt.
Unfortunately, I couldn't see when or if an angry Reaper was wading in through the pile of debris all around me. Eye's telekinetic shield wouldn't stop him for a moment. That complication was taken care of a mere moment later as the '49er waded through the junk piled up around the bubble, clearing debris away as easily as he could tear through solid stone. Behind me, I could hear a cry of pain as Hexagon was swatted away by Reaper. Dammit, Quentin, where were you?
I tabled the question as I stepped into the swing of the pickaxe aimed for my head, deflecting the inhuman force away from splattering my body.
"I know you can do it!" the '49er cried out, pelting me with coal dust from his breath. "End it for me please. No one else can!" He swiped at me once more with his free hand, no doubt trying to incite me to murder. The sad thing was that he was right. I was one of the few people who probably could take that shard of stone in his real chest and push it in the rest of the way.
"No, I won't," I said, catching one of his tree trunk legs on the knee with both hands. Letting out a cry, I heaved with all of my strength and flipped the massive miner over onto his back, shattering an office desk. I wasn't going to murder anyone, even Reaper.
It would take a moment for the big man to get up, so I turned back to see Reaper awash in electrical energy as Voltage and Gaslight both let him have it with their respective blasts. Polymer and Frost, on the other hand, took a more direct approach. For a moment, they seemed to make some headway as I moved to the side, looking for a good opening to make a move, Frost charging into his gut with a flying tackle while Polymer smashed him from both sides of the head with oversized mallet fists. I finally caught sight of Quentin as he smashed his batons over Dischord's skull. Too bad I also caught Doc Bio face-first in the rubble, partly buried, right near the scream queen.
"Tank, I'll try to keep him distracted but you've got to get another dose of that anti-psychotic medication made up." It's how we beat him last time. It should work again but I was starting to have doubts. I felt like the whole problem, the quandary of how Reaper was even here with Gerald asleep at the wheel, was almost solved in my head and that solution would mean everything.
I was ripped from my thoughts by the sounds of tearing rubber. Reaper had smashed Frost into the ground like a gnat and had Polymer in one fist, despite all her stretching and shifting, yanking on one arm, rolling the limb in his fist like one might make gather string. Something seemed about to rip clear, some viscid fluid akin to blood leaking out of the tears in her elastic skin. The teenager wailed in pain.
My foot crashed into the back of Reaper's skull just as a heavy crossbow bolt hit him straight in the eye. Letting out his first cry of actual pain, the monster dropped the badly injured youth as Extinguisher and the Human Tank rushed in, ferrying away both the dragonwoman and the elastic girl.
"You want me, just come asking!" I stamped hard with the other foot, sending Reaper staggering forward as I flipped back and landed on my feet. He whirled on me, eyes glowing red like a demon, just as Quentin rushed out from the right, slamming a fist into the beast's kidney. Though our strikes straight to the poor man at the heart of the monster seemed to phase Reaper, it wasn't nearly the effect I had on him in our first fight.
"Indy, Indy she's really bad hurt and I've got to help her first with the medical stuff but I won't be able to make the drug till I'm done but I don't know if she'll -"
"Help her then," I shouted, far too loud for the whisper microphone as I drove my foot into the crux of Reaper's knee. He flew as much as walked but he liked to plant himself before a punch. At the least it would hurt like hell. Dead on target, he wobbled as he lashed out, almost taking Quentin's head off.
We would just have to hold him. Or kill him. I was starting to rethink my declaration against murder made mere moments ago. Would it be wrong if we did? After all, this monster had killed hundreds in cold blood. Of course, to kill him involved the murder of an innocent man in Gerald Schuller.
"Enough of you gnats!" With a roar, Reaper threw out a corona of scarlet energy that did nothing but send a dull pulse of pain up and down my spine. Well, to me and Quentin at least. To the ground that we so desperately need to fight him on, that shattered into a million bits of rumble, sending Quentin and I tumbling down another floor.
The landing was rough and I felt a rush of pain as my left shoulder jammed hard, too hard, into the socket. Ignoring it as I always did, agony pushed behind that mental wall of will, I made a mad scramble back to my feet as Reaper picked up a particularly sharp piece of thick rebar. The kind that they wove into the main supports of buildings, it was maybe a good inch or more diameter. The murderer hefted it like a spear and reared back.
I've dodged a lot of things in my time under the mask. You could even argue I'd dodged a bullet or two, but that's not exactly true. No one outside of maybe a few Pushed could dodge a bullet. The best you could do is trust in having better reflexes than the shooter and that you watch for those physical cues a gunman makes before he shoots. You don't dodge the bullet; you dodge the shooter's aim and pray.
Reaper, though, had the reflexes of a god. I didn't even see the flinch before his arm was moving. I also didn't see the reptilian figure that had been rushing to my side before Reaper had even contemplated ending this drama.
I didn't feel the rebar rip straight through my breastbone and pierce my heart. Primarily because it didn't. I had been thrown a good ten feet away by Medusa as she charged me, her serpentine reflexes outmatching my own, almost a match for Reaper's. Almost.
'Almost' was enough to save my life.
It wasn't enough to keep the inch-thick piece of steel to rip through my best friend, tearing through phantasmal skin and scales, muscle, bone, and straight into the real woman underneath. Even if it hadn't pierced a lung and clipped the heart, the shock of the thunderclap-like impact was fatal on its own, even for a Pushed.
Medusa was dead before she hit the ground.
That's when I snapped and everything turned a shade of red.
Chapter 23 Between
"I appear to have broken one of your friends," the grinning demon said. "Trust me, it -"
No finesse anymore. No thought of my well-being. It was all rage and grief and murder as I flung myself at Reaper as he had drifted down, no doubt to get a better look at the woman he had just killed. A small piece of rational thought in me pleaded that being reckless now just made Medusa's sacrifice worthless, but I didn't care.
It was the first leading punch to the solar plexus that broke my knuckles and cut off Reaper's gloating. He buckled just a bit, bowing his head enough to be an easy target, so I took advantage, slamming a left hand right into the bridge of both Reaper's and Schuller's noses. Both erupted with blood as they broke. As I threw another relentless stri
ke at the now-reeling Reaper, I was only dimly aware of the rush of people to the edge of the hole we had fallen down. They only now were taking in the bloody tableau Reaper had painted.
It was Hexagon's cry of anguish that broke through some of that red haze as one last uppercut sent Reaper crashing onto his back. I knew that I had broken more than a few bones in both of my hands, but I didn't care. Reaper seemed down and I was still too awash in emotion to make sure of that fact. Instead, I ran to the bleeding corpse of my best friend as Hex landed down on the other side of Meds' body, making the leap in one effortless bound.
No intelligible words wanted to come out as the white-clad giant cradled his lover to him. If there had even been a chance she was alive, her utter stillness washed that away. The wound was even more horrific than I had thought. I knew I was crying but otherwise I felt frozen in place. Medusa was always the one to assure us that we would make it through fine. 'We're superheroes, right?' ... that was what she would always say. That she was the first one of us, the first of my friends, to die ...
Hex ... Henry ... had no words either, falling to his knees, choking with sobs. I found myself putting my arms around his shoulders and joining in his grief. Through all of this, Rational Irene was shrieking, trying to grab my attention, yelling that this wasn't over yet.
Quentin bowled the lot of us, our bloody burden included, over, his wiry strength enough to save Hex and myself from the steel girder a resurgent Reaper hurled in our direction.
"Dammit, we'll have a great funeral later," Quentin muttered as he clambered to his feet, "but we can't afford to have more."
"Come on, give those people some cover!" Extinguisher shouted from above and over the com. "Hit him hard and don't stop until he drops." There was a pause. "Hell, if you hit him after he drops, I won't say a thing." Those of us still in fighting shape washed down over the edge of the pit as I slowly got to my feet.
