Gods of Manhattan

by Al Ewing

  Maya paused. "He made my heart laugh."

  "Me too." He sighed, then scowled. "Makes. Damn it, he's not gone, Maya. He's stable, he's out of danger and the second he can be moved, I'm bringing him back to the brownstone. And then I'm going to give him a direct transfusion - supervise it myself. He'll be better than new."

  Maya frowned, suddenly deep in thought. "Your blood. You think Venger managed to spirit it away before he died? You think he's responsible for what happened to Monk?"

  Doc rubbed his temples. He didn't want to think about this now. "No. He was waiting for his chance. He's seen me give transfusions in the past to get people off the critical list, people with my blood type. He knew Monk and I were a match. It was a matter of time." He frowned. Something Venger had said - and something he'd remembered in the Omega Machine. He was having trouble putting the pieces together.

  "Why would he want it?" Maya was looking at him, curiously, as if seeing him for the first time.

  "The same reason Donner did." He shook his head, rubbing his eyes with a finger and thumb. He'd never felt quite so defeated.

  "And why did Donner want it?" Maya turned, looking him straight in the eye. "Tell me, Stranger." She said it mockingly, her eyes looking deep into his. "If you can. Tell me your true name."

  Doc looked at her for a long moment.

  "My name is Donner. Hugo Donner. Heinrich Donner was my father."

  Maya blinked. "But..."

  "You need to hear it all. Everything I've been hiding my whole life. Then..." He stood up, looking down at her. "Then I'll help you pack your bags."

  My story begins in 1935. Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for two years. He was chafing against the restrictions placed on him by Victoria, as he has been ever since. At the time, he was already planning an expansion to the east - his doomed attempt to conquer Russia - but the plan was always to move on to America. They were the enemy. Karl Marx had fled to America to escape the dark arts of the Tsars, the trade deal with Japan was making New York one of the most multicultural cities in the world, and President Grimm was speaking out against Hitler as early as 1931. Hitler needed Russia, he was willing to deal with China while it suited him, but he wanted us.

  Of course, it didn't take a strategist like Rommel to figure out that as soon as he'd done the hard work of taking Russia, Victoria would swoop in from the west and hammer him while he was weakest. Then she'd get everything, and deal with a diplomatic thorn in her side into the bargain. He needed a strong military - much stronger than anything he had - so he could take Russia, hold it, and still be strong enough to stay on the bargaining table against the Empire.

  He needed soldiers who wouldn't tire, who could see for miles, who could hear a pin drop fifty feet away. He needed soldiers immune to bullets and shells. Soldiers who could kill with their bare hands, travel in leaps of a quarter of a mile or more, punch out a traction engine.

  Sound familiar?

  That was Project Gladiator. The transformation of ordinary German soldiers into supermen capable of winning wars on as many fronts as he needed. He'd had people working on this since before he was elected, and by 1935 he finally had a serum - albeit one that had to be injected in utero, into the amniotic fluid, while the foetus was growing. It was the only way Professor Strucker could get it to work on the rats, and they weren't about to start injecting that stuff into prisoners. They needed a human test subject, and one loyal to the Fuhrer.

  Which was where Heinrich Donner came in.

  My mother's name was Anna, and she was two months pregnant with me when Donner decided that giving his unborn child up for medical experimentation was a good way to rise in the party machine. Anna didn't agree; not until he made it clear that if she went through with the birth without getting the injection, he'd strangle me in my swaddling clothes, cook me and make her eat me.

  Yes, really.

  She went through with it.

  Things didn't work out too well. Strucker had a massive heart attack right after injecting my mother. It turns out the only copy of the formula was in his head, because, like most people in the Reich, he was worried that if he stopped being useful for ten seconds, they'd kill him. Still, no problem. They could reverse-engineer the serum from my blood as soon as I was born, maybe even make a version that worked on adults. It would have bonded to my bloodstream. I was just the test animal they were looking for.

  Heinrich Donner volunteered to slit my throat himself.

  That was enough for Mother.

  Don't ask me how she managed to get away from him - she never did tell me the details - but she was in the Netherlands before the week was out. Four months later, she was coming into New York city on a fishing trawler and she thought she was finally safe. She never did contact the authorities, she just disappeared into a tenement on the lower East Side.

  That's where I was born.

  I wasn't the only kid on my street with a German name, but my build marked me out early. I grew like a weed and tore through books like a woodworm. By the time I was ten, I was as tall as a boy of fifteen and twice as broad, and I could pass tests college kids failed. Eventually, mother had to tell me why I was so different. That's how I first learned about Donner, my father. What he did. I asked her why she didn't change our name when she got here. She said it was because she hoped he might still come around. She was willing to forgive him, even after everything he'd done and threatened.

  "He was a good man, before the Reich. A good man." she used to say that with a little wistful smile on her face. I never did understand it.

  Especially not once he found her.

  While I was growing up, Hitler was trying to take Russia, and we all know how that turned out. When he finally threw in the towel in 1945, after a year of bloody stalemate just trying to keep his own borders from being overrun by every horror you couldn't imagine - and I've fought a few things from that region, I know what he was up against - the whole idea of taking on Victoria at her own game via conventional means was over.

  It was Donner who suggested the unconventional.

  Untergang. A criminal organisation with total deniability, sponsored under the table by Germany via black budget, but in such a way nobody could ever possibly prove it. A destabilisation tactic. A way to harry local law enforcement, strike out against the government, disseminate propaganda and perform covert assassinations and sabotage, while Uncle Adolf tut-tutted at the preponderance of crime in America and held up his clean, clean hands. Asymmetrical warfare. Terrorism on a massive scale.

  Since it was Heinrich Donner's idea, he was sent over as the organisation's leader. Oh, he had a cover in place, and a decoy to take the blame for him, but it was him behind everything.

  And he hadn't forgotten the promise he'd made to the Führer.

  On my eleventh birthday, I came back from school to find my mother had been murdered by a group of four Untergang black-ops specialists. They'd dragged her to the bed and suffocated her with a pillow, before rigging the apartment with incendiary explosives to cover their tracks. Then they'd waited for me to return. Their plan was to stage an armed ambush and take me down as quickly as possible. They had intelligence reports about how strong and quick I was - the same ones that had verified my mother's identity - and they were confident that, between the four of them, they could incapacitate me without difficulty. If it became necessary, they would simply kill me as they had my mother.

  Following which, they would steal the blood either from my unconscious body or my corpse.

  They thought they could surprise me, but they'd forgotten my hearing. I could hear them moving around, I knew something was wrong, and... well, I came through the wall. Just crashed right through it. That's how I got the first one; he was leaning against it. The others didn't last much longer.

  The apartment - my home for the first eleven years of my life - didn't survive the battle. My mother's body went up in the flames, along with every remnant of my life up until that point. I lived on the streets for a y
ear, dodging attacks from Untergang agents who literally wanted my blood.

  Eventually, I fell in with the police - Commissioner Coltrane was in charge back then. Danny's grandfather. I wish I'd thought to lie about my age, but we managed to work something out anyway.

  That was the last time anybody called me Hugo Donner. I wanted nothing to do with that name. I remember the desk sergeant - a guy called Bud O'Malley - asking me what my name was, and one word boiling up in my head...

  "Thunder," I told him.

  "Kid Thunder."

  Maya blinked. "Kid Thunder?"

  Doc shrugged, embarrassed. "Well, I didn't get my first doctorate until I was sixteen. Anyway, that's the story. Even after my skin got as tough as it is now, Donner still wanted my blood, and he was still willing to do anything he could to to get hold of it. And now... well, he's got it. After all these years. Much good may it do him."

  Maya reached to grip his shoulder, gently. "You really think it was him? A scheme he didn't live to see completed?"

  Doc shook his head. "I don't know." He looked up at her, and she saw the weariness in his eyes. "I don't know, Maya. I don't know the answers. I thought Donner was the only person who knew who I was or how I came to be, so... but I'm probably wrong. I don't know."

  He paused, then sat down, reaching for the cold coffee. He took a sip and grimaced. "And I don't know about you and me, either. I don't know if you can trust me - if you want to trust me to never make a mistake again, you can't do that. You can't trust me not to fail." He turned and looked at her. "But I need you anyway. I need you for this. Because I don't know what the hell I'm going to do next, Maya."

  She stared at him for a moment, frowning coldly at him. "No, Doc Thunder doesn't know. I think Doc Thunder's about run his course." Then she broke into a half-smile. "But I think you do."

  He looked at her for a long moment, then spoke. "Find out who's got my blood, if anyone has. That's priority one-" He was interrupted by the door to the lab opening.

  Marcel entered, carrying a try with two cups of hot, steaming coffee, prepared perfectly. "Monsieur, Madame. Everything is worked out, I trust?"

  Maya smiled. "Not nearly. But I think we've made a start."

  Marcel nodded. "Très bien!" He noticed the unopened paper. "Ah, Monsieur - you may want to look in the classified section today." He smiled, opening the paper to the correct page and thrusting it under Thunder's nose.

  "What am I looking for?"

  "El Sustantivo - just there, in the bottom left hand corner."

  Doc nodded. "Hmmm. Looks like our friend from last night wants to contact me. Or somebody." He raised an eyebrow at Maya. "About my stolen blood, too. Very convenient."

  "You think it could be a trap?" Maya frowned, peeking over his shoulder.

  "It's in Grand Central Station. That's a very public place, at least. Still..." He frowned, folding the paper and tossing it onto the workbench. "I think keeping that appointment might prove to be a very big mistake."

  Maya nodded. "So. What are you going to do?"

  Doc Thunder looked at her.

  "Make it."

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Case of The Quisling of Crime

  "Wuxtry, wuxtry! All the news, all the time, for a dime! Doc Thunder in battle with the Face Of Fear! Don't ask, just buy it. Red Mask sighted on hospital rooftop during deadly affray! Anton Venger returns from grave only to die a second time! Read all about the riddle of the missing doctor and the murdered master of disguise. Face it, true believer, this is the one! It's the pulse-pounding front page scoop we just had to call: 'IF DOOM BE HIS DESTINY!' Wuxtry, wuxtry! All in colour for a dime!"

  The paperboy's shrill cries echoed through the bustling station, competing with the grizzled old hot dog vendor -

  "One dollar five! Guaranteed unhealthy! C'mon, you assholes wanna live forever?"

  - and the sushi vendor ten feet away, trying to keep the stench of frying onions out of his fish -

  "Nigiri, fifty cents! Roll, sixty cents! We got tuna, we got eel, we got crunchy katsu pork! Just like mama makes!"

  - and the pencil-thin young man with his pencil-thin moustache, selling costume jewellery from a cheap suitcase -

  "Gen-yoo-wine fake diamonds! Gen-you-wine necklaces, chokers, bracelets, earrings made from real glass! Three dollars - can you say no, folks? Hand 'em over by candlelight, you can always run in the morning!"

  - and the slick, sharp-dressed breaker kids, taking off their zoot jackets to windmill on a flat sheet of card, two more playing the toms and freestyling over the top while a pair of bulls watched and tapped their feet -

  "- I'm the c-a-s an' the o-v-a an' the rest is f-l-y -"

  - and the porters calling the trains, and the passengers calling each other, and the luggage trolleys rumbling over the tiled floor, and the sounds of a thousand pairs of moving feet, echoing back and forth from one wall to the other and back.

  Grand Central Station at night.

  All human life was here - the housewife running from her abusive husband to her sister in Schenectady, the banker who couldn't face his wife's cooking without a couple of tonkatsu pork rolls inside him, the cops on the beat arguing about whether Warhol had finally lost it with all this dreampunk crap, the kid sleeping rough on the streets who'd wandered in to get out of the rain, the British tourists pointing and gawping at everyone else in between looking at their map and wondering how to walk to the Statue Of Liberty...

  ...and up above them, up, up in the shadowy arches of the station, where the gaslight didn't reach, there was a man in a pitch-black coat and a metallic, blood-red mask with eight glittering lenses, who carried a pair of automatic pistols, and he watched them all.

  Watched and waited.

  Occasionally, he glanced at the clock that told the bustling crowds how late they were for the trains they could never hope to catch now. Eight fifty-nine, and fifty seconds, fifty-one, fifty-two... he watched, his fingers on the triggers itching, buzzing, yearning, as the second hand passed the top of the arc and began a new circuit around the dial.

  Nine o'clock. No sign of him.

  The Blood-Spider hissed irritably into his mask.

  How typical of Doc Thunder to be late for his own funeral.

  "I do so wish you'd reconsider this course of action, Master Parker."

  Three hours before, Jonah had expressed his misgivings about the whole venture. It had come very close to ruining an otherwise excellent dinner of roast quail and asparagus tips.

  "Surely it would be safer to wait until you had, ah, acquired abilities commensurate to the good Doctor before embarking on a campaign against him?" Jonah swallowed, unused to this sort of confrontation. Crane only smiled.

  "Jonah, if I suddenly turn up being able to bend steel and leap the height of a decent-sized office building, he'll put two and two together. He knows somebody stole his blood. No, better to pick him off now before he suspects my involvement. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and Donner's murderer will turn up as well - warn him of the trap. Two birds with one stone." He lifted a forkful of quail to his lips, chewing meditatively for a moment. "And consider the larger picture, Jonah. America's Greatest Hero, gunned down in public! In the panic and tumult, the question goes up; who will replace him? His friends either die in mysterious circumstances or sail away to their forbidden cities, if they know what's good for them. And then..."

  He leaned back, smiling expansively. "A new Doc Thunder, for new times. The Blood Thunder." He laughed. "Blood and thunder! That's rather good, isn't it?"

  Jonah swallowed. "Master Parker, please. Remember the cause. The war." He laid his hand gently on Crane's shoulder. "You're taking a terrible risk. You seem to be becoming... unstable. Remember, Sir, that while you do have great power, you also have a grave responsibility."

  Crane shook his hand off. "I'll decide what my responsibilities are, Jonah. And I say this is the best chance to further the cause we've had yet. Doc Thunder dead, all his power in my hands... an
d total war with the inhuman elements of our society. War to the death!"

  Jonah looked at him for a long moment, and it was impossible to tell if what lay behind his eyes was reproach or pity. "I see. In that case, I will leave you to prepare, Sir." He began to clear away Crane's meal, then took a look around the dusty confines of the Lower Library. "One more thing, though, Sir, if I may."

  "Get on with it."

  "Sir -" Jonah took a deep breath. "- you are spending rather a worrying amount of time down here, in this room, sequestered away from the other Jameson Club members. There are other rooms in the club where you may take an early supper without raising quite so many eyebrows."

  Crane snorted. "And are there other rooms in the club where I may openly discuss the murder of such a prominent celebrity? With ammunition secured from the ashes of a known terrorist organisation? Hmm? Dry up, Jonah."

  "Sir, please -"

  "I said dry up!" Crane bellowed the words. "I'm the leader of this particular organisation, Jonah. Do you understand me? I decide what our strategy is! I decide who to kill! And I decide whether or not to leave my comfortable little nook here and spend my valuable time with those overstuffed blowhards up there!" His voice rose, uncaring, until it was almost a shriek.

  Jonah looked at him in horror.

  "Soundproof walls, Jonah." Crane smiled, his grey eyes mischievous. "Now, tell me again how you'd rather I said all that upstairs in the smoking room while passing out cigars."

  Jonah blinked, the look of shock still palpable on his face, and turned to leave. He did not say a word.

  "Oh, and Jonah - telephone. I'm going to need Ms. Lang tonight, I think. She at least knows how to obey an order."

  Nine o' clock.

  Marlene Lang waited patiently. Back straight in the leather seat, cap pulled down over blonde hair styled in a very severe bun, mirrored sunglasses. Hands in the ten and two position, unmoving. Lips frowning in an icy pout.