by Evan Currie
Ray winced, keeping the camera on the scene but unable to quite keep himself from focusing elsewhere in the moment as the creature charged.
The thunderclap that shook the chopper brought him right back, however, as he stared in incomprehension at the clear zone that had appeared from nowhere in the center of the street, dust roiling away in all directions as a line of destruction angled down the street and away from the cop.
Ray had to fight his gear, refocusing on the new subject that had replaced the monster.
“Oh shit…” Jack whispered over the hot mic. “It’s the Marine.”
*****
USSCOM Command Bunker, Virgina
Silence filled the room as the assembled strategists stared at the screen in shock.
General Harlan Isaacs broke the silence a few seconds later, disbelief in his voice.
“How long ago was he alerted?”
“Seven minutes, thirty-three seconds, Sir.”
Isaacs ignored the largely useless precision, focusing on the ballpark figure. “He made it from Texas to New York in seven minutes!?”
“And thirty-three seconds, Sir.”
Isaacs glared at the pedantic speaker until the other man turned away, flushed slightly. Isaacs nodded, turning back to the screen where the Predator footage was put up beside the feed coming in from the local news network. He was irritated that the reported had ignored the lockdown order, and he would very much enjoy reading the report of what happened to the idiot when he landed and the cops caught up with him, but for the moment he wasn’t going to toss out another video feed of the site.
“Was he briefed?” Isaacs demanded, “Does he know what he’s just stepped… well, flown into?”
“All he knows is that there is an incident in New York.”
Isaacs half turned, eyes falling on the speaker.
“Colonel Pierce, I didn’t know you were in the State.”
Emily Pierce tossed her go bag against the wall as she walked over, “I called in Hale from the plane. They had me in the air minutes after the police report hit the network. Too bad they didn’t get word back down to those cops just as quickly.”
Isaacs nodded grimly, “They tried, but the call got slammed up at the precinct. Their phone network was jammed, even with priority we didn’t through in time.”
“Well, might not have mattered,” Emily said with detached calm that came from having thought about it too much in recent days. “Whatever triggers them, well it hasn’t proven to be something we can predict.”
“Nonetheless, we have a mess to clean up now,” Isaacs growled. “And there’s not enough mops on the planet to deal with this crap.”
Emily nodded absently, eyes locked on the screen. “He’s already arrived?”
“They didn’t tell you?” Isaacs asked, surprised. “Took him seven minutes to cross the country.”
The unnamed man across the room half turned, mouth open to speak, but Isaacs glared him down, daring him to offer up the exact number of seconds one more time. He declined the invitation.
“He’s getting faster,” Emily said with a shake of her head. “That’s well into hypersonic speeds. Do we even have anything that could catch him?”
“Nothing manned,” Isaacs snorted, before correcting himself with a frown, “well, maybe a re-entry vehicle if it caught him just right.”
Emily grimaced, “If he can do it, then so can some of the others. We need a solution.”
“We’re working on it,” A man in a black suit interjected, drawing their attention.
“And you are?” Emily asked.
“This is Dan Markham, he’s with Skunk Works.” Isaacs said. “They’ve been tasked with putting a sled back in the air, and giving it teeth.”
“Something we’d be happier to have had at least a year’s notice on, I would like to say,” Dan said grimly, “but our engineers have been rather enjoying the last few weeks from what I’m given to understand. It helps that NASA has released a lot of patents to our use that normally we’d have to negotiate for months to access, of course.”
“I’ll bet,” Emily snorted, “but still, A Sled? You mean the Blackbird, right? Those never hit Hypersonic speeds.”
“No, they didn’t, but this one has some advantages over the originals,” Dan said, “including a new engine design we pulled from the X-39 project.”
“There’s an X-39?”
“Not anymore,” Isaacs said bluntly. “They’re missing their engines.”
“Sirs, Ma’am? He’s moving.”
The three turned to the screens, where the dust was still propagating outward from where Hale was floating in mid air, their focus intent on the action and other matters shifted firmly to the back.
It looked like the battle for New York wasn’t over, it was just getting started.
*****
Chapter 2
Alex looked down from where he was floating, eyes seeking out the cop in the dust and grime coated uniform.
“You ok down there?” He asked, before turning his eyes back to the target he’s hammered about half a kilometer down the street.
There was a pause before the man responded.
“Ooh rah, Cap.”
Alex looked back down at the man, unable to recognize him under the soot, dust, and grime to the point where he wouldn’t have been completely sure it was a man if not for the voice.
“I know you, Marine?” He asked curiously.
“Not personally,” The cop said, climbing to his feet, “we breathed some of the same dust, though. I watched your bio that came out after the Houston incident.”
Alex grimaced. He’d watched that ad hoc bio himself.
“It was a shit bio,” He said with a rueful chuckle, “They didn’t get half it right.”
“It was rushed, and I’m pretty sure the brass classified your sheet all to hell,” The cop shrugged before looking down the street, “You get him?”
“I tagged him, doubt I put him down,” Alex admitted. “Whatever changed us, it makes us damn hard to put an end to.”
“Don’t need to tell me,” The cop grumbled sourly, “I emptied a mag into the fucker. I don’t think he noticed.”
“I doubt he did,” Alex said, “Seen them take worse. I saw emergency response back about three blocks, they’re trying to clear wrecks from the road. You might want to head back that way and get checked out. I’ll deal with this.”
The cop looked back hesitating, “You sure?”
“Yeah,” Alex said as they heard a groaning of metal shifting. “And you better move now. I can’t guarantee it’s going to get any safer around here in the next few minutes.”
“Right,” the cop nodded, “Good luck, Cap!”
Alex waved over his shoulder, drifting slowly through the air toward the source of the sounds they’d heard. He could see wrecks of cars smoking up the street, adding to the general mess the area was in, but the changed he had struck wasn’t in sight.
This is a new shift, some sort of fallen angel, He noted, thinking about what the man, or former man, had looked like. It was an almost demonic look by western standards, but Alex was aware that in the older versions of the bible, which the Qoran took it’s lead from, angels were not pretty things with glimmering white feathers. They were not for human eyes at the best of times, in fact.
Alex touched down lightly in the street, standing at the edge of a pit that had been blown down into the sewers below. A glow of fire was visible in the shadows, and he could hear a rumble that might almost be human, except it clearly wasn’t.
Not any longer, at least.
Alex grimaced, sometimes hating the choices he’d made in his life, then sighed and hopped off the edge and dropped into the shadows.
*****
“The Marine has gone down into the sewers in pursuit of the creature that was raging through the downtown streets,” Jack called over his microphone as they lost sight of the subject. He quickly covered it over and leaned back, “Find some filler s
hot, while he’s gone, would you?”
Ray rolled his eyes, “No, I don’t think so. I’m going too keep the camera aimed right at that hole, Jack.”
“You’ll kill our ratings!”
“Jack, don’t be an idiot if you can help it. What do you think is happening down there?”
“Duh, the Marine is checking for the body.”
Ray snorted, “You are an idiot. Don’t you ever watch the news?”
“Not really.”
“Why does that not surprise me?” Ray sighed, “Captain Hale is hoping to find the body, but what he’s really doing it is prepping for round two.”
“He hit that thing at Mach One!”
“Probably a lot more faster than that, judging by the effects,” Ray admitted. “And think about it, Jack. If the Captain survived a hit at that speed, why wouldn’t the angel thing?”
If Ray was hoping to put a thread of sanity into Jack’s mind, he realized that he had failed utterly when the hopeful gleam sprang up in the reporters eyes.
“You mean the fighting isn’t over?”
“Seriously? Did you not see what happened in Hong Kong!?” Ray exploded. “We’re going to be lucky if we don’t lose a few city blocks down there before this is over!”
“I smell awards.”
Ray slumped.
Some people, he quickly realized, just couldn’t be either reasoned with, or understood.
That way lies madness.
He determined to simply do his job, it wasn’t like he could do much else of value anyway. It just wasn’t right that someone could even deliver a punch like that, let alone that someone else might actually survive it.
The world has gone insane. Maybe Jack isn’t the crazy one, after all.
*****
Alex landed in the water of the sewer, splashing lightly for a moment before he adjusted his height and turned to see the burning glow just a little ways ahead.
One of the more extreme physical changes I’ve seen so far, He had to admit as he approached the man with wings and sword of flames. Not the most, China’s Dragon still holds that title, but this still doesn’t look great for the city.
The hulking figure looked like a demon from a Hollywood movie, but based on his memory of religious beliefs of the middle east, Alex was fairly certain he was looking at someone’s idea of an ifrit.
A modern interpretation, by middle eastern standards, I would say. Probably from one of the modern Islamic sects that tried to incorporate the old stories into their religion.
That made it an angel of death or, perhaps, a demon of death depending on the interpretation of the person.
In the few months since the first change, it had become clear that the victim’s conscious mind had an effect on the change above and beyond the actual genetic editing. No one really had any idea how, but it was clear. Thugs became more thuggish, protectors became more protective, and Marines…
Alex grinned, self mockingly as the thought crossed his mind, and Marines become supermen.
Colonel Pierce likened it to an effect making self identity and delusion more real, but he liked to think it just brought out the inner him. Privately, Alex figured Pierce was closer to right, but he would never admit it on pain of death.
He heard cursing in Farsi as he approached, along with half a dozen other local dialects of the middle east. He dredged up his knowledge of the language, thankful for the small favor of dealing with a language he knew this time.
“Be at peace, friend,” He offered in a calm voice as he approached, hands up and visible. “I wish to speak, between strangers in the desert.”
The fires flared bright as the man turned, exposing a dark face with red lines glowing from under the skin.
“You! American swine!”
Alex raised an eyebrow at that. Not that it was the first time he’d been called such, but it was such a cliché that it threw him nearly everytime he heard it. Honestly, the terrorist types were terribly uncreative with their insults. Now, the American and allied troops, they could get creative as hell when returning the insults, not that most of the terrorists ever figured out what a tenth of them meant.
A flash of motion and a roar of flames refocused him, and Alex brought his arms up, crossed in front of his face, as he tanked the fireball without flinching.
“Enough of that,” He snapped. “We don’t need to f-”
The man screamed at him, reverberations echoing through the tunnel with enough force to make Alex wince as his ear drums were assaulted. He steeled himself, however, just in time as the burning man lunged forward with the flaming sword lifting high enough to cut a burning gouge in the roof over their heads.
Alex ducked under the swing, coming up with a left/right combo to rock the man’s head, then stepped in closer and pulled him into his knee.
The wind was blown out of him in a gust of sparks and flames as the winged man folded near in two over Alex’s knee. He followed through with a double axe handle across the back of the target’s neck to send him straight to the ground.
Against a human, even when Alex was fully human himself, that last blow would have been lethal. Against this… ifrit, however, he wasn’t counting on anything.
Steel scraped on cordura as he drew his fighting knife, a KA-Bar Becker fixed fighting blade, and made to finish the fight as quickly and cleanly as he could. Alex picked a spot at the exposed back of the ifrit’s head, one that should allow the blade to cleave the brain stem and drew the weapon back for the strike.
A roar from behind him caught him by surprise, and he was still turning when he was struck.
The knife clattered away as the blow lifted Alex right off the ground and threw him vertically into the roof of the tunnel with force enough to splinter the concrete and leave a marine shaped hole when he dropped free again and fell, stunned, to the shallow, fetid, water below.
Alex fought to suck in air as he rolled over, eyes wide and nearly unseeing as he could only make out shadows and lights for a moment.
No one mentioned a second target… ow.
“I just want to say, for the record,” He growled over the throat mic he was wearing, “that I feel I was denied some rather critical intelligence. There’s two of them.”
He didn’t wait for a response, pushing back to his feet as he took in the newly revealed individual.
He was dark, really dark. Alex blinked a couple times, trying to clear his vision, but decided that something about the figure was just… sucking in the light.
“Target two seems to be a shadow, or a black hole,” He reported in undertones. “Hits hard, difficult to track visually underground. I’m going to have to take this fight back topside.”
“Roger that, Captain. Good luck,” Pierson’s voice came back over his earpiece a moment later, even as he tensed and threw himself forward.
The sonic boom of his acceleration rocked the underground, Alex slammed his fist into the firey angelic figure with enough force to blast him back down the tunnel before he spun around and slammed his knee into the black figure with enough force to turn concrete to dust.
The target folded over his knee as Alex had hoped, wind clearly blown out of his lungs, leaving him open for the following uppercut that threw the figure into the air and then hard into the roof of the tunnel. Alex launched himself up with both fists outstretched, hammering into the figure and blowing them both through the tunnel and out into the sunlight.
*****
US SOCOM Bunker, Virgina
“Get the area around him evacuated,” Pierson ordered, “have the locals cordon off at least three blocks in every direction.”
“It’s New York City, Colonel,” The Admiral hissed, “Do you have any idea how many people are in that perimeter?”
“Less than there were, and a lot more than there will be if we don’t get them out of there,” She countered flatly. “Admiral, the Captain is holding back. A lot. I doubt his targets will do the same, which is why he’s trying to take them down fast,
but if they really cut loose, we’re going lose a lot of people no matter what we do. I’m advising that we minimize those losses, Sir.”
He glared at her, thought not seeming to really be seeing her as he did, then finally nodded.
“Relay the order,” He said, “And get the governor on the line. Tell him he’d best get off his ass and declare a state of emergency, or the President will do it for him.”
“Yes Sir,” his aide said, turning rapidly to run for the switchboard.
Isaacs took that moment to step into the conversation once more, “Talk to me, Colonel. What can he do, really?”
Pierson shrugged, “Honestly we’re not sure. In some ways it’s simpler to say what he can’t do. The Captain, unlike many of the others, doesn’t appear to have any projective combat capabilities. No force beams, eye lasers, throwing fireballs, you know the standard comic book drill. As best we can tell, he has one ‘power’, for lack of a better term.”
“Only one?” Isaacs asked dryly, “I’m pretty sure I’ve counted several already.”
She smiled weakly, “let me guess… flight, super speed, strength, durability… does that sound like the highlights of your list?”
“Pretty close.”
“He doesn’t have any of those, technically speaking,” She said.
“Could have fooled me,” The Admiral snorted softly.
Isaacs shot the man a warning look, but said nothing as he nodded back to the Colonel. “Go on.”
“He’s a telekinetic, Sir,” She said, “very limited range, mostly internal in fact. His muscle mass is identical to what it was before the incident, well maybe a little better. He’s no stronger or faster than we’d normally expect from a human of his fitness level, which is exceptional don’t mistake me.”
She took a breath, considering her words.
“The Captain somehow can martial a sort of energy field that we can detect, but haven’t quantified yet, and spread it through his body. The field can stop bullets, it can reinforce his muscles, it can lift him into the air… but it doesn’t actually change his physiology, unlike many of the others.”
Isaacs nodded, “I see. In combat terms, thought?”
