Week Two

[David]

[David]

DC2 Challenge
Week 2: “Darkness Spreads, A Storm Begins”
Written by Masoud House
Cover by Craig Cermak
Edited by David Charlton

[David]

Challengers Mountain

The large chamber was still bright: nearly a minute had passed when the light finally began to die down. Kyle “Ace” Morgan, retired Air Force pilot and founding member of the Challengers, almost thought he’d never fly again. His eyes were still dazed, but he let out a sigh of relief when they began to focus.

Ace and his friends still weren’t sure of what happened. Moments ago Dr. Stein, an old colleague of “Prof” Haley, had seemingly shown up out of thin air trying to warn the Prof of something called the “Shadowstorm”…and then vanished into a sudden blaze of heat and light.

“What kind of friends have you been making, Prof?” Rocky said, trying to rub the last of the brightness out of his eyes.

“That won’t help Rocky,” Prof. Haley remarked, “and Dr. Stein is one of the most respected scientists in the entire world. For him to just appear at our proverbial doorstep and then disappear right before our eyes…Well that’s just…”

“Crazy?” Red blurted.

“Unquestionably.” The Professor replied.

“That’s not the only thing either, fellas.” Ace said as the monitor alert siren began to wail throughout the chambers. The Challengers ran to the observation room, finding the monitor screen almost covered in red dots. Hundreds, if not thousands, of alerts began to pop up onto the screen. Prof. Haley had redesigned the computer to match cases by any linking data, but oddly enough, there seemed to be no common denominator.

A tune began to play all around the room.

“What is that?” Ace questioned.

“Er, well…” Prof. Haley quickly made his way to the screen, pressing a blue button and flipping a switch beside it. The tone ended. “It’s the theme song to Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius…it means we have a call.”

The screen faded momentarily, and then suddenly there was a ten foot face staring at them. The man was relatively young, with brown hair and an innocent face. Yet his youth seemed to be skewered by the worry showing around his eyes. “Prof. Haley! We have big problems.”

“Dr. Palmer! I wish I could say it’s a pleasure to hear from you, but we seem to be in the middle of a situation here.”

The young scientist nodded. “That’s exactly why I called you. You know my expertise right?”

“Microphysics. Nanotechnology. Nanoengineering. Anything small in the scientific world.”

“Well I’ve been monitoring several experimental microcosms . Bacteria, cells, particles, everything. And I’m finding a disturbing pattern.” His voice began to break. Static began to break up the reception.

“What is it? What’s wrong?!”

“Everything! Complex and orderly cell life is beginning to decay! Atoms formerly held together are beginning to enter a constant state of repulsion, causing mass atomic atrophy. And that’s not all. On the news, the weather is beginning to radically change. Places in Hawaii have hit below zero; Siberia has gone up forty degrees in twenty minutes. Everything small is inevitably giving rise to large destruction. It’s as if the very universe is going nuts! Everything’s just becoming so damned—“

“Chaotic.”

[David]

Gotham City Docks

Most people knew him as Cameron Van Cleer, and that was how he liked it. Took the name from a mix of teen celebrities, figured it couldn’t be worse than his real name—Drury Walker. Also, it’d keep the one good person in his family, his mother, safe from the scum he worked with day to day.

Walker was born and raised (and would most likely die) in the Bowery, the worst neighborhood in Gotham. He used to play jacks in Crime Alley as a kid. He’d seen dead bodies, men burned alive, and he had a knife put to his throat on a daily basis until he learned to get his own knife. All before he turned eight.

So he learned to adapt. He learned the ways of the Gotham City Mobster. But he was smart. He didn’t try to make big moves. He didn’t try to control Gotham like the rest of the nutjobs. All he wanted was a small slice of the cake. Maybe even a bit of the crust. He didn’t even need the fruit filling. All he did was play the protection racket, even though the damned Batman made living on the wrong side of the law hard. And though that worked at first, in the end he ended up like the rest of the bad guys.

What happened to the others? They were either arrested, and sent to Arkham Asylum after the inevitable insanity plea…or they were beaten to death by their rivals. Walker wasn’t lucky enough to get arrested.

Six men from a rival gang had beaten him to three different colors. And he was ready to just go to hell and meet the rest of his family, when three screeches rang out in succession.

What the…

Some thing fell from the sky, something black. It was hard to see, even when the dock lights shown on it…as if it up ate the light. The men around him looked around, suddenly scared out of their mind. “It’s the freaking Batman…I’m sure!”

While they were busy, the black gem fell straight into Walker’s lap.

Whispers began to creep into Walker’s mind, almost too much at once. Whispers of death, famine, war and pestilence. Plagues. A buzzing came in his ears, and got louder and louder. He closed his eyes, pushing at the darkness, pushing at the chaos in his mind. And then, all of a sudden, all was quiet. All was calm.

He opened his eyes.

Thousands of moths surrounded him, all of their eyes looking straight at him. The men around him had been torn apart and withered into corpses, moths nesting inside of the fresh corpses. He had never tried to do anything major in Gotham…he always wanted to keep it at thieving and extortion. But now, it seemed, he was a Killer.

[David]

Grand Avenue, Gotham City

A screech rang out against the unusual quiet of the city, and Jason Blood could have sworn that it sounded like a giant bat. Oh well, what’s one more thing to all of the chaos, he thought.

His body appeared to be that of a man in his thirties, which was remarkable since Blood was well over a thousand years old. But his eyes carried the age in them, eyes which had seen many wonders, and many horrors. Outside in the world, things were happening, and yet here it was like the quiet before the storm. All was timid and placid, yet there was a lingering cloud of darkness hanging over the city.

But Blood didn’t need to know the affairs of the world to know something bad was coming up—he could feel it in the burning pit of his stomach. The homicidal juggernaut inside him was straining for release, and he was using all of his demonic persuasion to get out. It took all of Blood’s concentration to avoid the temptation of saying the words.

The phone rang. He picked up the phone and on the other side he heard an old whispery voice greet him. “Hello, Iason.”

“If you’re calling me, then I assume that the Order is back and running.”

“It never stopped. Undoubtedly I assume that you have felt the chaos that is to come.”

“Of course I do. And even now, mystics across the globe are feeling it too. Soon the world will feel it. And we’re all damned unless there is a way to prevent it.”

“Oh there is. We have something that no one else has.”

“And what’s that?” Blood replied.

“An angel of death.”

[David]

Somerset, England

A fog drifted around a lone castle; dark clouds passed above. The ground around the castle was scorched with the pain of many dead men. The Earth was infertile, and on the full moon, the soil bled into the poisonous moat surrounding the land.

Inside was cold and stale, but one place was colder than the rest: the crypt. Two coffins sat within, one small, one large, lined with silver crosses, fig leaves, olive branches, steel chains and jade daggers stabbed into them. Arcane glyphs were inscribed around the room, seals and warnings to those who’d dare venture within.

The sky thundered and raged as a storm brewed. Quickly the ground was littered with black rain and the stink of cooked flesh. An acidic mist ate at the castle furiously, until it eroded the roof into patches of useless steel.

The clouds parted in the sky. A siren howl screamed from the sky to the ground as a crimson lightning bolt came down and struck the castle roof. Without hesitation, five more bolts followed, turning the roof top into rubble and leaving a lingering stench of sulfur . The ceiling of the crypt was exposed; soon six more bolts came thundering from the hellish sky, tearing the ceiling apart. A chorus of siren howls brought along six final bolts of lightning to rage into the crypt.

Inside the crypt, smoke drifted and swirled as the silver crosses and steel chains melted into little more than molten pools. The fig leaves and olive branches had been burnt to ashes, while the jade daggers had been turned to charred powder.

The coffins shook and trembled, first lightly, and then furiously. Soon the coffins exploded, and inside two bodies levitated. Moments later they righted themselves, their feet touching the floor as their bodies hunched over in exhaustion. The smoke gathered around them and they breathed it in. Their tattered clothes repaired themselves. Their lifeless eyes began to burn with vigor.

The smaller of the two, a boy no older than twelve, shook his head lightly and put a hand to his forehead. “Mother…how long have we been sleeping?”

His mother’s dress trailed behind her as she moved towards the garlic-lined windows. With but a wave the entire wall fell, turning to dust just inches away from her richly embroidered gown. Although her face was almost entirely covered by a gold mask, her pale, pupil-less eyes were visible and peering at the cold sky. “More then a millennia my dear son.”

The boy, dressed all in black, put a hand to the floor of the destroyed room. The castle rumbled as fallen stones came together to create a bridge for the boy, leading him down to the ground. He walked to a thorn-filled graveyard, snapping his fingers, and causing the ground to spit up a small, weathered skeleton. A tear ran down his cold, pale cheeks. “Look mother. Look what they did to him…”

“That is the price we paid for being the most feared witch family in Camelot, my boy. There was no one who did not tremble at the name of Morgaine Le Fay and her son. After the fall of Arthur, Merlin and his little band tried to destroy us. And they nearly did.” She grew quiet as sorrow over came her. The boy’s face wrinkled with a newfound determination. He stood, whispering a spell while cutting a line of blood down his arm. The blood dripped onto the grave, spreading out into a ghastly pool of crimson over the grounds. A cacophony of wails and screams pierced through the silent night as thousands of hands reached from below and began to savagely tear their way through to the surface.

The boy smiled. The corpse before him began to grow from the soil and blood and fatten into an orange cat with forest green eyes. It shivered slightly, and then walked to him as he kneeled to pick him up. The boy stood once again, walked to his mother, and looked over the army around them. “They may have killed your first son mother,” the boy started, an ominous smile stretching from ear to ear, “but they’ll rue the day that they tried to kill your new son.”

Morgaine Le Fay regained her composure. A storm began to thunder in her eyes and an eerie glow surrounded her. “You’re right my dear Klarion…let’s remind them of how Camelot, the greatest kingdom in all of history, fell to its knees before us.”

[David]

To be continued!

[mockingbird]

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