by Peter Clines
Corrupts Absolutely?
Edited by Lincoln Crisler
Editor’s Preferred Edition
© 2015
Cover Artwork by Malcolm McClinton & Shawn King
Additional Copy Edits by Amanda Shore
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Worldwide Rights
Created in the United States of America
Published by Ragnarok Publications | www.ragnarokpub.com
Editor-In-Chief: Tim Marquitz | Creative Director: J.M. Martin
Introduction
Superhero stories are the mythology of our modern culture. If anything, this statement is truer now than it was in 2011 when I put together the first edition of this anthology. From their humble beginnings as the staples of an entertainment medium geared toward a very specific demographic (namely, comic books), superheroes have become a phenomenon available to—and enjoyed by—an ever-growing segment of media consumers. If that sounds like unfounded hyperbole to you, spend a couple hours in a crowded public place looking for someone who’s never heard of Wolverine or the Hulk. Before 2000, it wouldn’t have been a difficult proposition.
Despite the prevalence of superheroes in comics and movies, however, and as much as I’ve loved comic books for over two decades, there’s one area in which I’ll always feel prose is the ideal format for superheroes specifically or at least has the most potential to be: artistic integrity and authenticity. Comic book fans have remarked upon for decades the regularity with which heroes and villains come back from the dead or with which status quos shift and reset. Since the initial publication of Corrupts Absolutely?, for instance, there’s been an Hispanic version of a traditionally white hero, a villain’s mind housed in the body of a hero, another (white) hero retiring and his mantle being assumed by one of his (black) associates and yet another’s very godhood being assumed by a woman.
The only one of those that’s had staying power to date is the first, and even that happened to the main character of a long-running alternate universe series. And there are good, viable reasons for this. A lot of money, time, and creativity is invested in giving life to a Spider-Man, a Batman, or a Joker or Magneto. If they die “for reals,” the company who owns those characters can’t use them anymore. In time, they’d fall from their honored places in the culture. When you’re talking about characters created in and enjoyed since the ‘40s and ‘60s, clearing the slate and starting fresh is a difficult proposition.
In addition, companies and creators would run the risk of not being able to make lightning strike not twice but repeatedly, consistently creating new, compelling characters to be placed in authentic, real-world scenarios with authentic, real-world consequences. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s why Magneto comes back when Wolverine kills him even though if I stab you with a handful of knives, you ain’t comin’ back. That’s why Batman doesn’t kill the Joker though the Joker’s killed hundreds if not thousands of innocent Gothamites. A good prose author can create interesting characters and tell a gripping story every time. There’s no corporate bottom-line, action-figure deal, or thirty years of back history to consider.
So, on a very personal level, as a creator and consumer, the opportunity to bring you this definitive version of what I feel is a masterwork collection of superhero prose couldn’t have come at a better time. Every one of the stories on these pages is a labor of love for the superhero genre from award-winners and new authors alike. This new edition features not only brand-new cover art but the text of my 2012 online editor’s retrospective, the author’s preferred version of “Fixed,” and two new stories from Peter Clines and Warren Stockholm—pieces that, by a sheer twist of fate, were solicited for the original edition of Corrupts Absolutely? but weren’t available at the time.
From all of us to all of you, thanks for picking up Corrupts Absolutely?, and we hope you enjoy the hell out of it.
Lincoln Crisler
Augusta, Georgia
August 2014
Table of Contents
Retribution – Tim Marquitz
Hollywood Villainy – Weston Ochse
Mental Man – William Todd Rose
The Real Church – Jeremy Hepler
Ozymandias Revisited – A.S. Fox
Enlightened by Sin – Jason M. Tucker
Bedtime Story – Peter Clines
The Origin of Slashy – Jeff Strand
Conviction – Edward M. Erdelac
Threshold – Kris Ashton
Oily – A.D. Spencer
Hero – Joe McKinney
Pride – Wayne Ligon
G-Child – Malon Edwards
Past Imperfect: A Scorpion Story – Warren Stockholm
Illusion – Karina Fabian
Sabre – Anthony Laffan
Crooked – Lee Mather
Fixed – Trisha J. Wooldridge
Acquainted with the Night – Cat Rambo
Gone Rogue – Wayne Helge
Max and Rose – Andrew Bourelle
About the Authors
Retribution
Tim Marquitz
September 11, 2001, 8:46 a.m. That’s when it all went to hell.
The date and time are seared into my mind with a heat I can only pray my wife never felt. Candace had found her dream job. Just the week before, she’d started at Channel 5, WNYW. Their offices were on the 110th floor of the North Tower, and she’d worked overnight, preparing for her first time on camera. She was just a fill-in, but she wanted to be perfect. Candace always did.
She was scheduled off at 9:00.
She was also six months pregnant with our son: Joshua Michael Drake.
We’d only settled on his name a few days earlier. I never got to meet him. They never came home. Just fourteen minutes before Candace would have been in the elevator and down past the impact point, I lost them both.
I lost everything.
No, that’s not entirely true. I didn’t lose everything. After watching all I loved disappear in a roiling cloud of gray smoke as the building went down, there was still one thing left in my life. Once all the tears had dried and the empty words of comfort had soured on sorry tongues, there was still my fury.
I’d been a good husband until that moment, 8:46: the moment they took them away. I’d been a good man.
That man died with his family.
#
September 11, 2006, 8:40 a.m. Revenge was but six minutes away.
While the world had watched my wife and child disintegrate live on television and had seen the eagle roused in righteous anger, our soldiers sacrificed in foreign lands, it would never know the truth of what had been set in motion that day. The jihadists had brought the struggle to our shores, but five years after, our nation had been dealt a grievous blow. The war had yet to truly begin. In five minutes, it would start in earnest. With me.
My job was to repay our enemies in kind.
It was my pleasure.
The road from then to now had been difficult in far more ways than I could ever have imagined when I signed up to fight. I wanted nothing more than to kill the bastards who’d stolen my family from me. All I asked of my country was a gun and a one-way ticket to the desert. It gave me so much more.
The morning sun of northern Waziristan beat down upon my head, the heat already sweltering as I made my way along the dusty streets of Mir Ali, heading toward an open market. My skin darkened by chemical staining and my beard grown out thick, itching at my chin and dyed black like my hair,
I looked as though I belonged.
I was dressed in the traditional shalwar kameez, colored in a simple brown and carrying nothing. The other people on the narrow lane paid me little attention. I affected a shallow limp to feign a sense of weakness and greeted those I passed with quiet courtesy, my teeth clenched to still my tongue. After five years of learning the language, I was proficient, but it always paid to be cautious. It wouldn’t do for someone to note a flaw in my inflection, the anger in my voice. Not when I was so close.
In another three minutes, it wouldn’t matter.
Central Intelligence reports had placed a number of ranking al-Qaeda fighters in the area, the people of Mir Ali complicit to their presence or, at the very least, complacent. No real difference between the two in my eyes. You harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist.
Inside the market, I moved amidst the jumbled stalls and carts, my eyes drifting as I weaved my way toward the thickest concentration of shoppers. I was disappointed there were so few women around, the local culture hiding them away from the eyes of men not their husbands. My dissatisfaction was tempered somewhat by the number of children that ran laughing through the crowded aisles. They were mostly boys, but there were a few girls as well, all too young to be coveted yet even in their society. I counted nearly thirty who scampered about: twenty-seven young boys who would one day take up arms and fight against my nation and three girls who would breed more. The numbers were hardly equal, but it would be a good start.
Two minutes.
I sidled up close to the busiest of the stalls, patrons haggling in quick tongues over the price of chapatis, the long loaves of bread stacked a dozen high. Flies swarmed about, their humming buzz adding to the morning’s furor. It was hardly the last meal I would have chosen, but then again, none of them knew just how close to death they were.
I ignored the old man barking at me to move away if I wasn’t buying and let my heart settle. He’d be quiet soon enough.
My thoughts reached down, and I felt the first stirrings of heat in my veins, my blood warming in response to the pressure of my will. The man went on, threatening violence if I didn’t step aside, only affirming my cause.
I raised my finger and smiled at him, mouthing, “One minute,” in his own tongue. That only set him to frothing, his tantrum drawing an audience of onlookers to the stall. I should have thanked him, but I needed to concentrate.
Blocking the ranting shopkeeper out, I closed my eyes and sent the spark of my fury to light the fuse inside. My stomach roiled with stinging acid, and I could feel the sweat pushing its way from my pores, coating me instantly in a wet sheen. The man went silent as though he could hear the boiling rush that was building, the napalm sear that rippled beneath my flesh.
I opened my eyes to see him staring at me. His face was twisted in almost comical confusion, and I wondered what he thought—not that it really mattered. The people who had gathered to watch the shopkeeper’s tirade had drawn back a few steps, their voices muted by the uncertainty of what was happening. They sensed something they couldn’t understand, but still, they gathered thick, sheep too dim to see the culling ahead. It was too late to run.
I turned to face the crowd, my smile breaking through the blackness of my beard. “You have taken my family from me,” I told them in English. Though most of them probably didn’t understand a word I’d said, there was no doubt they understood my intent. Their eyes went wide at the recognition of an enemy among them, one of the great Satan, but that thought would be their last. “Now I take you from yours.”
8:46.
With one more push, my blood boiled over. A flash of white stole my vision as the gift my government had given me took hold. Pain lanced through my body, growing sharper with every instant. The agony multiplied like shattered glass, each shard breaking into a million more and yet again and again and again. All but the simplest thoughts left my head, my essence too scattered for true coherence. Split into a billion pieces, my consciousness was a tiny blip in each, my body broken down into its basest molecules. Every atom imbued with the fury to match Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement, I felt myself explode.
A blur of motion filled my remaining senses and I was overwhelmed by the feeling of being hurled in every direction at once, vertigo at its most exhilarating. Though it seemed, even to me, to be impossible, I noted each and every impact as my fiery essence tore through the assembled crowd, shattered the stalls, and decimated the wares, millions of me peppering the ground where I had just stood. Dust whipped about in my wake.
For the briefest of instants, I was one with everything in the market: the earth, the air, and flesh and bone. As my being tore through theirs, it was as though I could taste them, sorting the blood from wood and dirt without a thought. I could hear the people’s screams inside me, though I had no ears, and could feel their lives ending as I punctured each with a million different fragments of me. The world was alive with ruin, a crimson cloud holding court amidst the carnage.
My momentum carried my discorporate particles out to a radius of about a thousand feet. My essence slowed at last as it burst through the surrounding obstacles of shops and homes and the remnants of my energies drained away. I could feel gravity’s return, its gentle tug pulling the whole of me toward the ground. The sense of separation began to ease, clarity drawing closer like a ship approaching shore. Now came the hard part.
There weren’t adequate words to describe the pain that came with reintegration, but as the pieces of me slammed together, becoming one again on a genetic level, no agony could steal my satisfaction away. As they had with us, I had brought the war to our enemy in a way they had never imagined.
Flesh and feeling returned with an acid bath rage, pieces of a puzzle set upon the surface of the sun. I could feel myself knitting back together and recognized every molecule as it wove itself into the whole. Sense congealed while muscles and tendons stretched and returned to their natural shapes, growing over thickening bone. The smell of char filled my developing nose, and tears spilled from newborn eyes. I was nearly me again.
Close to two blocks from the market, I was reborn, huddled naked on a mattress of wreckage brought about by my righteous fury. My skin sizzled, gray tendrils of smoke wafting about me as the energies inside slowly cooled. I drew myself up and heard my joints creak, the pain and stiffness of my transformation ebbing.
All around me, I could hear the cries of the wounded, those too far from the epicenter of the blast to have met their end with a merciful swiftness. There was no time to revel in my satisfaction.
Men shouted, and the morning air was filled with the crackle of flames and the sounds of panic. Black smoke swirled through the streets and alleys, obscuring the world from my eyes and me from the men that swarmed nearby. It was only a taste of the ruin they’d brought.
I swallowed my smile and rubbed dirt and ashes across my skin, nicking my flesh in a number of places with a sharpened piece of debris and then slathering blood across my body. For all my success, I had yet to escape. So far behind enemy lines as to be unreachable by my allies, it was up to me to find my way out.
Deep in the throes of adrenal fatigue, I had no need to fake the appearance of the walking wounded. Every step was an anchor drawn through sand as I emerged from the sheltering alley where I’d coalesced and stumbled out on the street. Mournful wails rose up as chaos began to break, the truth of what I’d wrought coming to light. I could only imagine what they saw. Flickering images of the moment twisted and tangled inside my throbbing head.
I staggered toward the desert, hoping to remain unseen, but I’d done my job too well. All of Mir Ali was in the streets, drawn by my release of power. A man shouted, his gnarled finger pointed at me, a dozen more taking up his cry. I looked about, seeking a clear path to run, but there was none. What wasn’t blocked by a cluster of onlookers was made impassable by the fires set by my conflagration. My heart sank for an instant, but I remembered my guise. All of those who’d heard me
speak were gone, red stains about the market floor.
Only one outward sign remained to betray my true origins. I crumpled to the ground and curled fetal, moaning incoherent. The men rushed to my side with heavy steps, but there was no anger in their voices; only concern.
“له ما سره مرسته,” I told them as they closed. Help me.
Words of comfort filled my ears. They believed I was one of them.
Rough hands pulled me into the air, the largest of the men cradling me in his arms as though I were a child. His eyes narrowed as his nostrils flared as the stench of burned flesh drifted up to assail his nose. I let my hands fall to my groin as he blinked away tears, covering my genitals from sight. None had noticed my circumcision.
I let the man carry me, burying my face in his chest to muffle my barked laughter, turning it into a cough. He jarred me about as he ran, shouting to clear the path ahead. His footsteps slapped as they struck the packed dirt roadway. A few moments later, he slowed, his breath loud in his lungs as he called out for assistance. More hands clutched at me, pulling me from his arms. I was a set upon a makeshift gurney, a woolen blanket laid overtop, only helping to hide the truth of who they had helped.
I could hear their chattered voices as they scrambled for direction, the gurney raised unsteadily beneath me. Daring a glance ahead, I saw the doors of a medical center looming before me, the Red Crescent emblem emblazoned above in chipped and peeling paint. Men in white met us at the threshold, taking the gurney from those in the street and transferring me to a rolling cart. As they wheeled me down the hall, flickering lights flashing above my eyes, they asked in clipped voices where I was hurt.
I gave them only one answer, “My heart,” then I asked for the time. They looked at me strangely, but one of the interns glanced at his watch, thinking perhaps he was granting a dying man’s wish by answering.
9:02.
I smiled in thanks, meeting his dark eyes as we burst through the inner doors of the hospital, the room busy with people. With a deep breath, I mustered my will once more and drew upon the fire.
