A Horror Story 4: Down With The Sickness

Blah blah Phantasm not Phantom etc etc, you should know the drill by now.

This year I figured I'd do another examination of certain kinds of evil. Considering the time period this story was written during, it may seem close to home.


Ambition is not inherently a bad thing.

Why should it be? Natural instinct is to survive and thrive. Humans have demonstrated that they can utilize their old animal instincts beyond their initial capacities, indeed, they are almost compelled to do so in their own base design. There is nothing wrong with improving one's lot in life.

It's how you go about it...therein lies the problem.

Maybe it's just a flaw inherent in the system, how those who so desperately seek power are often the least deserving of it. I could go on for pages about cruel kings and dictators, with their armies of sadistic secret police and their abominations committed towards their fellow man, all in the end for some vaguely defined and understood desire of "more". How much history of the Christian religion was using words of love and understanding towards your fellow man to control and murder others. How so many wars could be defined by the old French soldier's curse "lions led by donkeys"...

But still, ambition...it's not a bad thing, in and of itself.

I just wish...more people understood the dark side of it, instead of embracing it as the norm.

I think that's really how this incident went down. Someone with great tools enters a world that is, by its nature, skewed. You know how a hot tub seems unpleasant when you first enter it? Same thing. Actually, maybe a better analogy is a broken leg bone that doesn't heal correctly, back in the older days of medicine. You simply had to adapt to the new way your limb did (or didn't) work, or you'd fall behind and die.

What happens when you enter something where the wrong way has become the right way by who knows how many years of blind adaption?

Changing a system...the task seems as inhuman as the flaws do.

So most just become a part of it. It feeds on itself. And then along comes the next crop.

Before you know it, the best for the job are the worst suited for it.

Maybe.

Maybe we're all just screwed up, somewhere deep down.

But I know I wouldn't have done what happened when one of River Dynamics' subsidiaries made a weird little thing while doing some research one day...


New York City. July 22nd, 200X

River Dynamics would have insisted that the concept of the all-consuming supercorporation was ridiculous, a product of dystopic science fiction and people who were still certain man had faked the moon landing. In the era of accounting scandals and stock market upheavals, credibility was an important thing.

And as far as River Dynamics' CEO Thaddeus Quisling was concerned, once you learned to fake that, you were on your way.

Not that every part of his company and it's various holdings was shot through with corruption carefully concealed through the alternating use of smoke and mirrors and bread and circuses. Oh no. Part of Quisling's efforts over the past 15 years had been focused on making sure there wasn't some tumor growing away in a corner of his company, the one his father had started and broken his back and health to build into the once-steel and now electronics and communications-based giant it was, with sub-divisions in various other divisions, primarily medical ( as they were started by Thaddeus' father in an attempt to cure his mother's cancer, and continued after he had failed in his attempts to prevent that pain from befalling someone else), that would drag the whole body down with it.

He'd done pretty well, as far as he could tell.

True, maybe it wasn't all clean...but what in business was? Someone had once condemned Thaddeus at some dinner for some scandal over supposed "biological weapons" that his company may or may not have been connected to. Thaddeus had been calm and courteous, when in reality he wanted to grab the idiot's face and scream that they better damn well hope that companies like his developed the next world-killing superbug, because you could bet that over in Russia, or China, or India, or some other backwater place where they didn't speak English the very same efforts were being made by people who likely had far less morals and sanity in their way then those who were trying to design such things in the States. People liked to condemn the States for being a bully too. Thaddeus admitted it wasn't perfect, far from it...but if a hundred people in the States were offered a button that, if pressed, would spontaneously kill every single person in the Middle East, Thaddeus honestly believed that a quarter of them would press it, at most. And probably even less if they were shown clear proof the button worked. If such a button was offered in reverse, could you say the same? Oh yes, there were many debates you could make, and many had valid points...but in the end, do you really think the number of people in the Middle East would be less?

There was always going to be dirt involved. Always some level of murk. Better to accept it and work with it then fight against it. That fight was pointless.

It was one of the many lessons Thaddeus had learned on his climb to the top. Oh, no cronyism here. His father had pushed him to the breaking point to earn the position he'd built, and Thaddeus had done so. He deserved this position, and all it entailed. And he didn't need someone telling him he was a bad man for it. Had he done bad things? Yes. So did everyone else. It did not make him a bad man.

And it didn't make his company evil because it did engage in some less-then-noble practices.

Of course, Thaddeus had no intention of arguing these things. He had work to do. And that had been what he'd been doing.

Until the doors to his office had abruptly opened, startling him out of his focus. Anger shot through him: he hated, HATED being interrupted, and even more so when the person didn't knock. Someone was getting fired soon...

Except Thaddeus didn't think that the person walking through his door worked for him.

Considering he couldn't recall any part of his company where the workers would do their jobs wearing a black and white skintight outfit and long duster coat. Not to mention the boy's white hair, which Thaddeus was pretty sure was against company grooming standards.

"...who the hell are..." Thaddeus said.

"I'm Danny." Danny Phantasm replied, as he went over to the wall, selected a chair, and dragged it in front of Thaddeus' large desk, sitting down in it. "Hello."

"...how the hell did you get in...security...!" Thaddeus snapped, as he pressed a button under his desk.

"Don't bother Mr. Quisling. Twenty minutes ago everyone in the company got an urgent email for a basement meeting in...the Vidkun building, I believe it was. Your secretary also got one demanding that you not be disturbed before that other email was sent. By you."

"What? I sent no email!"

"Yes, that's sort of the point. By the time everyone realizes they've been mislead, well...it will be some time. You've got a lot of good little trained seals here. As for your security, someone called down to investigate a strange incident in the parking lot. You can't see it from up here, but a few friends of mine are leading them on a merry chase. And just to make sure they're not distracted, well, every line of communication up here has suffered a bad case of, what was it called, oh yes, ghost signal complete shutdown. It's like that movie: anyone who looks or check sees a carefully modulated loop of normality unless they look carefully. You know the movie don't you? It had that bus that had to speed around the city, keeping its speed over fifty, and if it's speed dropped, it would explode? I think it was called...The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down."

Thaddeus stared incredulously at the white-haired boy.

"...right, should have realized you don't watch The Simpsons." Danny said.

"What is the point of this intrusion!"

"Oh, blank indignation. Good to see you keeping to the checklist. I'd like to have a talk with you."

"If you think I'm going to just sit here and..."

Thaddeus didn't see where the sword came from: just that a moment later the boy was slamming it down on his desk.

"I INSIST." Danny said calmly. Thaddeus stared at the weapon (how strange, it was full of square holes running up the blade...but its point seemed as sharp as any other sword, and that was the part to avoid), then at the boy who called himself Danny, who shifted in his chair, his strange green eyes looking at Thaddeus.

Thaddeus took a moment to collect himself before sitting down. He could handle this. He'd had meetings with hostile people before.

"You seem to have gone to considerable trouble. What exactly do you want to discuss with me?"

"Ah yes, aren't we slick." Danny said. "Actually, you can rest that likely silver tongue of yours. I'll do the talking."


Romero, Mississippi. July 8th, 200X.

"Geez. And I thought things like this only existed in Neo-Con's wet dreams." Danny commented as he looked at the green sign besides the road that welcomed him to Romero, proclaiming it had a population of 27,000 and that it was "Nice To Have You".

"Been having more late nights with Sam?"

"I've had insomnia lately." Danny replied, as he walked back to the road. "So, you're certain you're getting no Fissure readings."

"None, nope, nada. This place is completely clean."

"Right, completely clean. It just showed a sudden unnatural spike in 911 calls and frantic web messages about contradicting details of some kind of disaster, and then had all communication abruptly cease shortly afterward. AND all records of said confusion were found to be "in error" twelve hours later. That either means Fissure activity, or the town fell into the Twilight Zone." Danny said. "Something's not right here, and I want to find out what."

"What if it's not our business?"

"Strangeness is our business Tuck. No matter how it goes down." Danny said, as he started walking down the road.

No cars. That was NEVER a good sign. It wasn't exactly a major highway that Danny was walking down, but there should have been SOME kind of vehicle passing back and forth. When there was...

...what the heck was that?

What Danny had first thought were some harmless streetlights or telephone poles were quickly revealed to be something else, mainly because one of them was actually driven into the road itself (well technically, a foot off the actual side of the road, but still). Not to mention they had no lights or wires attached to them.

And the fact that once Danny got closer, it was clear they kept going in both directions.

"...Tuck you there?"

"Roger."

"Get that satellite you were considering "borrowing" zoomed in here. Tell me if you see a series of metal pylons surrounding the town."

"Dude, it's not a toy. You want me to sneak past about 6,000 firewalls, about three times that many trouble sensors, and hijack a 3 billion dollar piece of equipment that's so delicate that if someone sneezed on it it would go nuts?"

"Well yes."

"I did it while you walked down the road."

"Tuck I love you man."

"Is it that kind of story?"

"...What? Story?"

"Nevermind. I'm scanning in...uh...oh that's not good."

"What's not good?"

"I can't get a clear picture. That means two things. Clouds or smoke."

Danny arched an eyebrow, and then looked up into the clear blue sky. Not a cloud in sight.

"Curiouser and curiouser." Danny said, as he approached the strange metal poles. "So you can't really check Tuck?"

"Doing my best...you should be able to see the smoke yourself, there should be towers of it..."

"Yet I don't..." Danny said, as he stopped. "Signing off for the moment Tuck."

And Danny tapped at his ear, turning off the tiny communication device within.

"...yeah I know."

Danny stared at the strange metal poles.

"I was considering that myself."

He kept looking.

"We don't know for sure."

He nodded.

"Sounds viable." Danny said, as he removed the sheathed sword from his back and let it go, the weapon floating in the air as Danny approached the giant metal rods.

"Nothing yet...nothing yet...nothing..."

And then Danny stepped between the pillars, and he abruptly felt his hair stand on end.

And a moment later gigantic arcs of electricity zapped between the two pillars Danny had crossed, untold millions of volts dancing back and forth between the two rods for several seconds before stopping.

As Danny phased back into tangibility fifteen feet back the way he'd come, as he skipped backwards a few more steps before stopping.

"Geez." Danny said: if he hadn't gone ghostly the sheer voltage passing between the pillars would have cooked even him well-done. "Nickolai Tesla should sue...well, if he wasn't dead for decades."

His sword floated up to him.

"...good idea...but be ready, just in case." Danny said, as he grabbed the floating weapon and began running backwards.

And then sprinted forward for several meters before he jumped into the air, easily clearing the 20 foot tall poles and several dozen feet beyond that...

As the vision of a peaceful distant town was suddenly replaced by anything but.

Danny landed, his eyes wide. Tucker was right: there WAS smoke, lots of it, coming from the town of Romero, tall towers filling the air above the place. Danny jerked his head back, looking at the pillars. They weren't just electrical death-rods. They were projecting some kind of hologram between their lengths that hid the truth of the town. If Danny had been looking in a more upward direction as he'd approached it, he might have noticed the incongruity between what was shown in the the hemisphere distance and the eye level distance. But he hadn't.

Well, live and learn. Provided he was still alive when this was over.

"Hey Tuck." Danny said as he re-activated his communication nub. "Remember how I couldn't see any smoke...?"


"The NX-30 Imbedded Disabling Barrier." Danny said, as he laid some paper on Thaddeus' desk. "Capable of projecting a non-surface photographic concealment replica of whatever is programmed in...in order to lure the targets between the lengths where sensors will throw variable amounts of electricity between them, from mild disabling amounts to full on armored personal vehicle destruction. Patented to TenCo, which is a shell company owned by PilgramTech, which is a subsidiary to FlowTFD...which is of course, one of the lesser divisions of River Dynamics." Danny said. "As a friend of mine said, not exactly something you could buy at a Radio Shack. Especially since the technology is at least five years away from military testing. But wait, we're just getting started."

Now that Danny could see the proper truth, he found that the absence of cars made sense.

Because they were all crashed on the road beyond the barrier, everything from stopped and abandoned cars to burning wrecks. The stench of burning metal and plastics filled Danny's nose...and even that wasn't enough to block out a deeper, more organic scent beneath.

Burning human flesh. Danny was mildly familiar with that smell. And he hated it.

"We have a Quiet." Danny said, their code word for "something really bad has gone down but we don't know exactly what".

"Do you want backup Danny?" Maddie Fenton cut in on the line to ask. She always did. Danny didn't blame her.

"Let me get some more information first." Danny said, as he walked through the abandoned cars...

He almost didn't notice the sign due to them, barely catching it in the corner of his eye, as he turned around to look at it.

WARNING: DO NOT PASS THE METAL BARRIERS. APPROACH THE GRAY-SUITED MEN INSTEAD AND MAKE IT CLEAR YOU ARE NOT AFFECTED BY THE ATTACK. THEY WILL PROTECT YOU. BE CLEAR IN APPROACH, OTHERWISE YOU WILL BE SHOT.

Danny did not see any gray-suited men. He wondered if they still existed.

"...Tuck is there any government activity in this area?"

"Nothing official."

"What about UNofficial?"

"I checked when we were heading here. Nothing. No tucked away labs, no concealed military bases..."

"Check other routes then." Danny said, as he turned and began walking through the cars again. "Don't leave anything out. If there's no Fissure activity then something..."

And Danny walked around an SUV...and stopped.

"...oh God." Danny said.


"You've heard of Thalidomide, I assume?" Danny asked. Thaddeus gave no answer in his indignant imprisonment. "No?"

Danny dropped some more papers on top of the first ones.

"Thalidomide. Developed by the German pharmaceutical company GrĂ¼nenthal in 1957. Used as a sedative-hypnotic, and also used as a medicine to treat multiple myeloma, which is a type of bone cancer. However, it was chiefly used in the several years it was on the general market as an antiemetic, a vomit-prevention type of medicine, specifically to women to aid with morning sickness...which is a very, very BAD thing as Thalidomide, as it turned out, was also a potent teratogen, a chemical that causes birth defects. Pregnant women, birth defects. Perhaps you see the problem." Danny said. "The reason this was not discovered before thousands of women suffered was because the drug was forced through testing, which resulted in incomplete studies, mainly because drugs are profitable and what company doesn't like profits?"

"I don't like your accusation young-"

"Not done. The only reason it wasn't a lot worse was that a woman by the name of Frances Oldham Kelley who was working for the FDA refused to market the drug in the United States until further tests were done, despite great pressure from Thalidomide's maker company GrĂ¼nenthal. Her refusal proved correct, and she was rightly honored as a heroine who saved thousands of other women from suffering the same tragedy." Danny said. "...I sometimes wonder...people learn two kinds of lessons from such a thing. They learn what they did wrong...or they learn how to make sure they're considered right."


It wasn't the first time Danny had seen a corpse. Finding bodies had become a rather depressingly common occurrence for him the last few years, ever since Vlad screwed everything up in his selfish delusions.

It wasn't even the first time he'd stumbled across something EATING a corpse. In fact, that had happened fairly recently. And oh what fun it had led to...

The problem was what was eating the corpse. It wasn't a monster.

It was people.

Two people, to be precise. One was ripping chunks of the face off with its teeth, the other was...wasn't actually eating the corpse. Instead, it was just ripping pieces of flesh out of the ruined mess that had once been the body's, a man's body to be precise, stomach cavity...and throwing them aside as it reached in to rip more free. The killers were a black teenage girl and a white man in a business suit, both as bloody as their victim as they ravaged the corpse.

"...damn." Danny whispered.

Apparently that was enough for them to hear, as both snapped up their heads and looked at him with blazing, psychotic eyes.

"DAMN." Danny repeated.

And then they were attacking him, sprinting towards him with inhuman shrieks.

"Damn, runners! Stupid remakes!" Danny cursed as he recoiled away from his attackers, as they grabbed and clawed at him, trying to get a grip on his coat. Danny leapt up and back, landing on a car a few dozen feet away, as his attackers briefly looked around for him.

"Tuck I have a...!" Danny tried to say.

And then the crazed, bloody humans were attacking him again, forcing Danny to run off the car and leap some distance away again.

"Flare! I need an analysis!" Danny said as he yanked the sword free from his sheath, having kept it in hand the whole time. "Yes that kind!"

Danny's attackers were charging again, and Danny realized that if his knowledge of anatomy (which was decidedly lacking despite his mother's efforts) was correct, the businessman was running on a broken knee. Which should have been impossible...but considering what Danny had found the two doing, he already had a pretty good idea why it wasn't.

As grayish energy flowed out from his sword, and speared out from the tip of it, forming a ten-foot long line from the end of the blade as Danny slashed it out.

The gray energy went right through the attacking savages without harming them.

But that was what Danny wanted, as he again leapt away, this time over them, as he bounded with several more quick leaps to land nearby a burning car.

If Danny had been paying attention, he might have noticed the car was freshly burning.

"...what?" Danny said, as he watched the savages thrash around in the distance, unable to find him this time. "Are you...?"

As another form, all aflame, erupted from the burning car and pounced on Danny from behind.

"GYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!" Danny screamed, even as the burning body that had once been another teenage girl tried to sink her teeth into his neck, even as the fire seared at his exposed skin...

As Danny bent over and put a hand on his chest, firing an ecto-blast right through him that blew off his flaming attacker. She crashed down to the ground with a sickening crunch, even as Danny snorted, icy air shooting out and flowing over his back to quench any remaining fire. At least his attacker wasn't getting back up: the severe angle her head was now twisted at suggested why...

As the other two savages charged at him, screaming.

"...damn."

And Danny ran at the pair, as reddish energy erupted on his blade this time.

There were two swift slashes.

And the savages fell, their heads rolling off their shoulders and smacking down on the ground.

For a moment, Danny was worried they would get back up again.

Then he realized that, despite his efforts, he HAD been bitten on the neck.

"Flare, another check. Hurry." Danny said, as he pressed the sword to his neck, feeling his heartbeat pound within his chest.

"Danny? What's going on?" Maddie said in his earpiece: Danny ignored her for the moment, listening to Flare speak inside his head.

"You're sure?"

More noise in the distance. Danny peered towards it.

"...whew. Thank god for some small favors." Danny said, and pressed down on his ear. "Tuck, Mom...well, you're not gonna believe this...you know that dream scenario that Tucker's spent the last seven months preparing for ever since he read World War Z?"

"Cool! You mean there are...!" Tucker interrupted.

"NO! NOT COOL! IT'S TERRIBLE!" Danny abruptly yelled back. "And I got bitten."

"WHAT?" Maddie screamed.

"I'm all right. Flare says whatever's wrong with them can't be transferred...well, by being bitten anyway."

"Wow, weak man." Tucker said.

"Tuck, I love you and all, BUT CRAM IT." Danny growled. "Real people are dead. And if I don't do something, more are going to be, whether whatever this is can be transferred or..."

And then they appeared, more savages. Danny had been correct when he thought he'd heard something. And apparently, they in turn had heard Danny.

"I'll get back to you." Danny said, as he turned off the communication, as the red energy ignited on Flare again.

The savages charged, shrieking.

"I'm sorry." Danny said.

And then he went to work.


"According to this, you were considering selling it under the name Tafebeno." Danny said, dropping more papers on Thaddeus' desk. "It's clever, the way you buried it under all this medical gobbledygook. Most people would have no idea they were ingesting a synthetic worm."

"If you are suggesting..."

"Oh no. I've seen the reports. Your sub-division, what was it called, Saferlife? They were trying to create something that could pinpoint and destroy cancerous cells. Less risky then chemo and radiation. You ended up creating something else. It's happened before." Danny said. "Instead you created something that, in your testing, was found to attach to the stomach, absorb a certain amount of nutrients, and then die and be expelled by the body. What makes people fat? They eat too much food, or the wrong kinds of food, or both. The body's designed to use a certain amount of nutrients; if there's too much, or if it can't use or expel the junk aspects of the food, it gets stored as fat for later. An old survival mechanism, which is backfiring now because too many people don't need to worry about survival but other things and their bodies are getting warped accordingly. Yes yes, there's stuff involved like genes and bone structures too sometimes too. This is about the bad kind of fat, the unhealthy kind of fat. And considering the mindset of companies, I can't blame you for wanting to sell it as a diet aid. It seems quite literally win/win: the worm does all the work, using up the extra nutrients so the body doesn't stockpile them, and then it's expelled with the rest of the waste, and people lose weight, possibly even without diet and exercise."

"I assure you..."

"What part of I'll do the talking did you not understand?" Danny asked. "Like I said, it would all be perfect if you'd properly and fully tested it. But why would you want to do that? The weight crisis is NOW. Proper testing could take years. So you steamrolled the process through. It should be easy, considering all the money you've "donated" to various groups. And hey, you had a good place to ensure the squeaky wheel got the grease. A little town called Romero."


The Magnus Flareium rent the air. Blood sprayed. Limbs detached. Voices shrieked in uncontrollable anger, as Danny hacked and slashed his way through the few dozen attackers that had been drawn to him, the out of control former humans finding Danny a far more slippery target then their previous victims. Danny grimaced at the work: his sword was burning with a "fire up and forget" type of energy he called "Absolute", mainly because there was absolutely no way to dampen it down: it struck living flesh, no matter what its precise condition was, and sent a destroying shockwave through the creature's nervous system that fried the brain. Against living creatures, Danny would never consider using it.

But these poor bastards really couldn't be considered living any more, not after what Flare had told him. So in that regard, it was mercy.

And messy: another advantage was that unlike the classic way to deal with "these problems" was to aim for the head, this let Danny hit them anywhere and kill them. And considering he was all alone, he didn't have time for precise cuts and attacks: he had to hack a few down in anyway possible, whether it was a glancing cut or a complete body bisection, and then scramble away to keep the rest from overwhelming him. The end result was if he'd wandered into a slaughterhouse randomly swinging some chainsaws around: by the time all the former humans were cut down Danny was covered in blood.

"...Geez...talk about a way to run a railroad." Danny cursed, as he tapped the bud in his ear. "Danny here."

"Are you all right?" Maddie asked

"In a sense. Look Mom, I know you want to come in and help, but I still need more..."

Another Savage, as Danny had decided to officially call them, appeared, running at Danny. Danny blasted it off its feet from a distance and stabbed it while it was down.

"Information. So hold off..."

Three more came for Danny. One wide slash put their spasming bodies to rest.

"Until I..."

One nearly snuck up on him, resulting in Danny disemboweling the Savage when he swung. The smell of the spilling intestines made his stomach roil, and he quickly moved on.

"Figure precisely how we're going to tackle this!" Danny said. "I'll sign in again in a bit!"

And with that, Danny turned off communications and resumed cutting.

It might have worked out better if he'd stayed on, as Danny fought his way up the road, dispatching Savages in ones and twos and small pockets and feeling worse and worse at the fact he wasn't finding any survivors. Because his teammates had begun to debate the fact that if there was something sealing the town OFF, the odds were good that there was something INSIDE the barrier besides the poor bastards who had once been normal human beings.

As Danny found out, there was.

The hard way: he'd entered the suburbs of Romero and had been taking care of business...until said business suddenly involved three rough families. Including young children.

Danny knew they were beyond help, but the concept of hacking up young kids made his stomach turn worse then the smell of guts.

So he'd done a lot more dancing and dodging then attacking, to ensure he could deal the kids fatal wounds "that he could live with".

He was down to two kids and one adult when he heard the faint yelling. He leapt back and turned towards it...

To see strange forms in front of him, covered in full-body gray armor (oh look the gray suited men) and illuminated, faceplated helmets...

And wielding flamethrowers.

"HEY WAIT A...!"

As the weapons lived up to their names, and Danny was, for not the first time in his life, on the receiving end of an inferno.


"The Alexander Corps." Danny said, as he dropped still more papers on Thaddeus' desk. "Technically called a private security company, but more truthfully known as mercenaries. Which is all fine and good...except they really shouldn't have Neon-NGH body armor, which according to this..."

More papers.

"Is also a good seven-eight years behind when it would be economically viable to equip soldiers with them...something about how paying seven million dollars per man is a bit too high at the moment...but where the army balks, private enterprise is always willing to step forward, right?"

"Do you have a point?" Thaddeus replied, his indignation being to be replaced by annoyed frustration.

"Getting there...because the question would be, why would such a group with such equipment be doing in a small town in Mississippi a good 24 hours before I showed up..."


As more of the A-Corps personal stepped from behind the flame units and opened fire with several quick bursts from their machine guns, dropping the last remaining Savages as they danced in the grip of the flames.

"...did anyone see anything wei-" One began.

As Danny leapt straight up out of the thick smoke, the glowing energy dispersing from around him as he flipped forward and landed in front of the startled mercenaries. That had been rather close, but after some of the fire that Danny had been on the receiving end of in his lifetime, blasts of ignited chemicals lacked a certain bite.

Danny had hoped jumping up in an arc instead of right out of the flames would prevent skittish trigger fingers from directing bullets at him.

He was wrong there, as the soldiers yelled and began shooting at him.

"GAH! ACK! STOP SHOOTING!" Danny yelled, more green shielding energy exploding around him, even as a bullet ricocheted off of it and sent a spike of pain drilling between Danny's eyes: he wasn't used to such "normal" assaults. "STOP SHOOTING! I'M ON YOUR SIDE!"

Well, Danny wasn't sure of that, but there was no time to split hairs.

"CEASE FIRE! CEASE FIRE IDIOTS! THE A.I.S DON'T TALK!" A voice yelled, as another armored mercenary, his protective armor smeared with blood, yelled as he appeared behind the group, his voice managing to succeed where Danny's had failed, as the armored men lowered their guns. Danny in turn dropped his shield and turned his sword away from the group as he rubbed his eyes.

"You!" The Maybe-Sergeant said, as he drew a sidearm and aimed it at Danny. "Identify yourself immediately!"

Go figure.
"I'm the Phantasm." Danny replied, not exactly willing to give out his "full name". "I'm afraid I don't have a rank or a serial number to give you."

"...what are you doing here?"

"The same reason rejects from Halo are running around Any Suburb, USA." Danny said. "Look, are we just going to argue over pointless nonsense? Because if we are just say so so I can get out of here."

"...stand down men, go help the survivors." The MS said, as he gestured towards the flamethrower and rifle wielding mercenaries.

"But sir, our orders..."

"Our orders have changed four times in the last nine hours! DO IT!" The MS roared. This time the armored men listened, as they turned and ran off without another word. Following their motion, Danny could see more of the armed and armored mercenaries in the distance...escorting shell-shocked normal people who all bore the same dead-eyed look from having the uncanny valley dropped on them with a vengeance.

"I'm assuming since you just got yourself out of the way of a purifying strike by jumping several dozen feet into the air that you didn't just wander in looking for a gas station." The MS said, as he pressed a button on his helmet as the tinted blue plastic slid aside, revealing old, scarred features. Italian, Danny thought. "Said jump might also explain why our deterrents didn't keep you out."

"You guessed right. What's going on?"

"We don't know kid. We were just sent in to "neutralize a problem"...and I've lost a third of my men because they didn't specify just what kind of problem." The MS said. "I should have known something was going down when they ordered those electro-rods deployed."

"That bad?"

"Kid, I am one step away from firebombing this whole forsaken town and god damn the consequences." The MS said.

"I want to help."

"Why?"

"It's what I do."

"...one of those types I see. All right, what can you do?"

"A lot."

"Details would be nice."

"I've learned not to give those out."

"Kid, if I can't make an accurate assessment of what you can do, I could send you to your death. I may not know you or care, but I'm not a monster." The MS said.

"Let me worry about that."

"...all right, if that's the way you want to play it..." The MS said, as he led Danny over to an armored personal carrier where two mercenaries were being treated for wounds and more shell-shocked survivors were being herded away from a battle in the near-distance: Danny could hear faint yells and snarls mixed with gunshots and the hollow sucking noise of flamethrowers, as the MS led him to a table with a map.

"Now, as you've probably found out, the A.I.S'..."

"The what?"

"Aggressive Irreversible Subjects, the things that were once human, poor bastards."

"...right...really rolls off the tongue." Danny commented. A.I.S. How very military.

"Right. First off, forget about trying to save or fix them. The damage is, as their name says, irreversible. They might as well already be dead."

"...okay." Danny said quietly, deciding not to mention that Flare had already told him exactly that. Despite said uncanny valley all around them, Danny doubted the military man could deal with a talking sword spirit.

"Also, as you probably also saw, they don't feel any pain..."

"And only go down if you shoot them in the head?"

"Or cook them a good while. Or both." The MS said. "The only blessing is they can't spread their disease. They can rip you apart with the strength of madness, but they can't turn you into one."

"You're sure?"

"Our multiple tests, observations, and autopsies confirm it." The MS said. "One of the few blessings we've had in this slice of hell."

"This "problem"...it can't raise the dead, can it?"

"...no kid. Why would it? That's ridiculous."

"I just wanted to make sure. Because on the surface this strikes me as very much like..."

"DON'T. Say that word." The MS said. "Now, here's the town..."

The MS laid out a map.

"We are HERE." The MS said, pointing to a spot near the bottom of the map. "Now, THIS area..." The MS said, indicating a chunk of the west and southwest. "Is pretty much clear. It's where we're keeping the survivors. Due to an opening that showed up about four hours ago, we're cleaning out the area HERE..." The southeast. "With a big push. Apparently it drew away the border guards who would have radioed in about your presence otherwise. The problem is HERE."

The MS stabbed his finger in the northeast of the map.

"When this manifested, it was the main road out of town. People tried to run that way, and the A.I.S followed and ended up massing there. We sealed off the town before they could get any further, but doing that had created a giant mob that our few probe efforts have proven would be very unfeasible to directly assault. We've managed to keep that...corpus if you will, from surging back and overwhelming us...but I don't think we can do it much longer." The MS said. "You want to help kid? Go in there and thin the herd. It'll let us advance and crush the remaining numbers once we've fully evacuated and sterilized the other area."

"How long do you need?"

"An hour...maybe 90 minutes tops! Is that feasible?"

"...survivors?"

"In that death pit? Long odds child. Very long odds. Never say never...but I doubt it." The MS said. "You want to rescue people? Then keep those A.I.S off our backs. Best thing you can do...all alone anyway."

"I'm not alone. I can call in help if you need it."

"How much?"

"Not a giant number, but definitely something."

"...well, I can hardly refuse, can I?" The MS said. "What do they look like?"

Danny gave a proper description and then turned away, tapping on his earbud. He'd put the receiver in wide range sound when he'd jumped out of the fire: hopefully the team had heard everything. Considering they'd stopped talking to him shortly after the MS had, Danny figured they had. Or he'd lost the signal, which was something he didn't need.

"You did hear that right?" He actually asked.

"They're suiting up now Danny." Tucker replied.

"Track my location. Work from there. I'm going into the tangle."

"Alone?"

"Yes, alone. I have the best chance of coming out alive." Danny said. "I'll contact you if anything changes. And Tuck? Don't treat this like a video game. It's not."

"No, that was last year."

"...was that a year ago...ugh, my ability to keep track of time sucks these days." Danny said. "Heading in. Out...of contact." Danny said, as he signed off. "I'm going."

"Well good luck kid...do try not to die." The MS said.

"Been there." Danny said. "Know the road."

And then Danny sprinted off, leaping off in the distance.

The MS watched him go for several seconds, as another A-Corp member approached him.

"Lieutenant, the men are somewhat concerned, considering the nature..."

"Tell the men I've been doing what I've been doing since they sent us into this hellhole." The MS said as he closed up his faceplate. "I'm adapting."


"So, you want to market this Tafebeno, but you don't want endless delays. And you need a smokescreen if someone decides to sniff around. So you go down to your little testing ground. Hey, you've used it before. Got a decent indigestion medicine out of it, even, a few years back. But people probably won't be so comfortable swallowing an artificial life form that according to test results absorbs excess food material. I mean, you can do the same thing with a tapeworm, and UGH!" Danny said. "So you did what your kinds do best. You obscured the issue."

More paperwork.

"Lawyers would have trouble reading that. Something I'm sure you counted on. But what it comes down to is that you mislead the populace. You told them you were testing a pill for stress, and that some weight loss might be a side effect. And hey, everyone has stress these days, right? Oh yes, and the cash incentive probably helped as well. Anyone could always use a few extra bucks." Danny said. "So you got lots of takers. Thousands, in fact. During the end of June. And everything seemed fine...mainly because of the timing. The timing which dropped a giant hammer on all the poor bastards you tricked into taking your would-be diet aid under false pretenses."

Still more papers.

"Because in your haste to market it, you didn't test the product as thoroughly as you could have. You were hoping the unofficial Romero case study would demonstrate to the less ethical people in power that everything would be fine. Apparently the world has fewer Frances Oldham Kelley's these days." Danny said. "Oh, I have holes in my information. Maybe I'm coming at this from the wrong angle. But I definitely know this: you didn't test what happens when the product ingests Sinapis alba."

Even more paper. The stack in front of Thaddeus was getting rather thick: how Danny kept all those papers straight in his jacket was a mystery.

"See, the problem with artificial life is that, bred in a laboratory, you can't be sure how natural life will interact with it. There are well known demonstrations of what happens when you introduce natural species into areas they weren't before...and the disasters that followed. Artificial life is even more of a crapshoot." Danny said. "Remember I mentioned tapeworms? Well, when your product ingests Sinapis alba, it begins to act like another kind of worm. Baylisascaris, to be precise, a family of roundworms. More specifically, it begins to act as Baylisascaris do if they're not in their proper hosts, of which humans are not. Should Baylisascaris end up in such an improper host, it will break through the cell walls of the digestive organs and enter the bloodstream, entering various organs as they try and find a new home, and potentially doing a great deal of damage in the process. And one of the primary places Baylisascaris in humans has been known to enter is the central nervous system. The brain included. In the case of Baylisascaris, certain kinds of brain damage have been recorded."

Danny's calm glower suddenly increased in intensity.

"Your product managed to create a brand new one."


They were everywhere, snarling and stalking the streets below the buildings Danny was leaping off of, the once nice-town of Romero turned into an apocalyptic wasteland as the A.I.S, the Savages, roamed the streets. That was the source of all the smoke that had blocked off Tucker's attempted scans, as the transform of the people into their current state and the chaos that had resulted had set over half of the primary town on fire. Now there were no more people to attack. Just Savages.

Which begged the question: why weren't they attacking each other? Danny had no answer to that: according to the data he'd been given and collected himself, there should have been no way the Savages could tell each other apart. They should have been as willing to destroy each other as the non-infected. And yet they didn't.

It was questions like that took Danny's life from "hard" to "a gigantic pain in the ass", and hence he tended not to dwell on them, as he spotted a suitable target: a 10+ story tall office building. It would serve.

Summoning a quick surge of power, Danny leapt and actually sprinted up the side of the building before leaping on the roof. There were no Savages on it. Good. Danny checked: one entrance and exit. Even better.

"...yeah I know, I don't know if this will work either." Danny said. "But better then fighting down in the streets."

And Danny held the Magnus in front of him and focused.

Normally, he used this power to attract animals. Human beings, with their conscious', tended not to feel it.

But Danny had a feeling there wasn't much left involving conscious in the Savages below.

And he was right.

The yells and snarls reached his ears from below, and Danny, peering over the roof, could see that the flow had shifted, all directing towards the building he was in. The Savages would all coming running at Danny's call, trying to get up and attack the strange figure that emitted the alluring essence, and the stairs would force them into a bottleneck.

And as for the rest, Danny had it covered, as his blade ignited with the red Absolute energy...shot through with another, yellow energy. It lessened the effect of the nerve-destroying power somewhat, but the usefulness of the new energy was in its name.

Kickback.

As the first Savage burst from the rooftop stairway and charged at Danny.

Had Danny swung normally, he might not have even knocked the Savage down.

With Kickback activated, the Savage flew into the air like Danny had hit him with a wrecking ball, screaming as the residual Absolute energy burned through him, even as he fell off the roof.

As more Savages broke out from the door.

And went sailing off into the air as Danny slashed them as well.

More came. Danny's eyes narrowed in focus.

"You're gonna go hungry."

And as Danny slashed and tore through the constant stream of attackers he'd summoned, he realized that not only did his taunt not matter because these creatures didn't eat brains, but that he'd inadvertently insulted himself.


"I'm not quite sure how to describe it." Danny said. "A kind of twisted, dark...mirror of the survival instinct? To survive, people have to take life...but they also have to give it. But when your product mutated, entered the bloodstream, and ended up in the brain, it proceeded to somehow...rewrite all that. Eat through the brain until all said brain cared about was survival through death. Like taking life...allowed their life to continue. I think that's how their madness seemed to them...and why some of them were just ripping apart the bodies they'd killed without actually ingesting any part of them. I don't know. As I think I said before, I still have unanswered questions." Danny said. "But that's what happened when your product, Tafebeno, ingested Sinapis alba. Or in English, the white mustard plant. Whose seeds, strangely, is mostly used to make what we consider normal, yellow mustard."

Thaddeus stared.

"Your testing period started in late June. If you'd done it a month, a week earlier, you might have caught it early. But you did it just before July 4th." Danny said. "Romero had a big celebration that day. You know what people like to do during Independence Day celebrations? Barbecue Do you know what a lot of people like to barbecue? Hot dogs and hamburgers. Do you know what a lot of people like to put on their barbecued hot dogs and hamburgers? Mustard."

Danny's finger stabbed at the pile of papers.

"Your oversight into the nature of your own product and your cynical "study" ensured that you didn't get a Patient Zero, or isolated pockets of this reaction. You ensured that roughly 60 PERCENT of the Romero population all turned, over the next few days, into monsters."

Danny's glower increased even more.

"But the worst part is...that's not the worst part."


There were times, when he was feeling low, that Danny wondered if he was just a cog in a machine.

He certainly felt like one now, as he stood on that roof and slashed and slashed and slashed, cutting down Savage after Savage, over and over. No wonder those horror films always had such long odds. When the odds were stacked in the hero's favor, things became repetitive and dull. It was amazing when the survival against legions of murderous creatures was reduced to a mere chore...but that was just another tick on the list on how Danny hadn't expected his life to turn out.

He slashed away a few more, feeling the faint tinge of weariness beginning to settle in his arms. How long had he been doing this? He'd lost all track of time...

"Danny!" The voice crackled in his ear. Valerie.

"Can't talk, hell, no room, you know." Danny said, as he took down some more Savages.

"Danny it's...!"

And then a loud scramble of noise canceled out Valerie's voice, as Danny's eyes narrowed. Interference...?

And then it happened.

Danny was never quite sure what. He later theorized all the Savages pouring into the building had broken something, a gas main or something similar.

Or maybe something else entirely and all too purposeful. They could have flown an entire wing of planes by Danny and he wouldn't have noticed in his focus.

As the bottom of his "stand" building abruptly exploded.

Danny's eyes widened, and then he threw up a shield as he ran over to the corner of the roof he was on and looked down...

As the lower floors exploded upward, and Danny abruptly found the building's stability completely removed.

And he wasn't so good at flying when he had the Magnus in hand. And he really didn't have time to switch.

"Oh no." Danny said, as the building began to fall.

And unable to think of a proper swear word, he made one up. Or remembered a made up one. He couldn't recall.

"COPPLEBUTT!"

And the building collapsed, taking Danny Phantasm down with it.


"...That might have been an accident." Danny said quietly. "Maybe. But there was no accident in regards to what happened next. I know."

And Danny laid the final paper down.


Coughing, Danny stumbled through the smoke and wreckage, trying to clear his eyes. It took more then a falling building to take him down...

But that wasn't the problem.

It was why he climbed on top of the building to begin with that was the problem.

As they came for him, charging through the smoke, the Savages. Danny slashed through them, his sword burning with Absolute energy again, but more came, and more. He was rapidly becoming surrounded.

But as badly as he was outnumbered he was never outgunned, as he tore through the Savages in a bloody frenzy, trying to get clear for a moment...

"DANNY WHERE ARE YOU!" Valerie yelled, making her return by screaming into his ear.

"BUSY!" Danny yelled back.

"DANNY THEY'RE KILLING THE SURVIVORS!"

"What?" Danny said in confusion, as he backflipped and fired a blast into the ground, briefly scattering the Savages before they returned with twice their number.

"THE SOLDIERS! THEY'RE SHOOTING THEM!"

And Danny's heart went as cold as ice.

As an old voice piped up in the back of his head and told him that chances were, he'd been manipulated again. Just like old times.

"NO! DON'T LET...!"

And then they were on him, seizing on his moment of distraction to crush him beneath their numbers, as Danny disappeared with a scream into a tide of ripping, consuming death.


"I spoke with one of them, briefly." Danny said quietly. "He seemed like a decent man. I found him dead later...of a gunshot wound. I suspect it was going to be called friendly fire. Nothing friendly about it though. I think maybe, in the end...he got an order even he couldn't carry out. Not that it mattered, as you certainly knew just who to give such an order to."

"Despite your attempts to link me to this tragedy, I insist I know nothing..."

"THAT'S YOUR SIGNATURE." Danny said, once again stabbing his finger on the top piece of paper. "YOU sent the Alexander Corps in once your product went bad in such a spectacular fashion. Not only that, you EQUIPPED them. And you had a reason for that: when you realized just how messy it was, you signed off on the final order. No witnesses. And the Alexander Corps carried it out. Or rather, they tried."

Danny leaned back in the chair he was sitting in.

"I shouldn't be here. You should be in jail under a massive pile of charges. But you're not." Danny said. "Because that special armor, that one of your other companies, A-Next or whatever, that was given to the Alexander Corps? There weren't just fatal electrical discharge devices around the town. They were in the armor as well. And once my team got in the way of your slaughter, you decided to make absolutely sure and signed off on them as well. At least that order you were smart enough not to put on paper. And that was that: they died in mid-battle. With the mercenaries dead and your "accident" dealt with, all you had was a bunch of near-mindless survivors who were taken in when the government got properly involved."

Danny shook his head.

"I don't blame them, really, for covering it up. Even they aren't really sure what went down. The media was fed the story of a terrorist attack. Considering someone burned the whole town down...well, why not? Sounds like something they'd do. A great tragedy. And it is. But not for the reasons that have been presented." Danny said. "People deserve to know what happened. The truth. But the problem is, there's so much muck involved that hardly anyone knows what the truth is. All they have are fragments, and people don't need that. Fragments get mixed in with a bunch of speculation and theory, if not outright lies, and that causes mass panic. Panic doesn't help anyone They need the proper truth, from the source. They deserve to know what happened. I can't tell them."

Danny briefly looked sad,

"I don't officially exist."


As blue light suddenly streamed from beneath the killing mass...

And then the Savages were tossed aside like insects, as Danny screamed and unleashed the full power of the Magnus, carving through the masses like they weren't even there. The problem Valerie had told him had completely faded from his mind. All that consumed him was the need to kill, to strike down the enemy.

Blood sprayed. Organs flew. Limbs broke, shattered, burned, bled. Death filled the air, matching any carnage the poor unfortunate victims of Tafebeno could have caused.

That was the problem with unlocking the Magnus in desperation.

You lost yourself to it.

You became, in a sense...

A savage.


And Thaddeus Quisling leaned back, looking at Danny...and then he picked up the stack of papers, as he began to glance through them.

"So...you want me to do what?"

"Admit your culpability in this tragedy." Danny said quietly. "The world deserves the truth, and those who died deserve justice."

"Justice you say..." Thaddeus said, as he continued to look through the papers. He did that for a few minutes, as Danny watched.

"...these are not the originals." Thaddeus finally said.

"It would be a problem getting those." Danny said. "Considering you had them all shredded and burned."

"...well, if that was the case, how do you have these papers?"

"I know some people." Danny said. "Including a certain...writer. In exchange for keeping him abreast of a few things...let's just say he can call upon the ghost of what has been written and remake it."

"So, these are replicas. Copies." Thaddeus said. "Which you very well could have completely made up."

"Do you really think you can make me think they're fakes?"

"You? No." Thaddeus said as he put the papers down. "But the legal system?"

Danny stared.

"My company has more lawyers on retainer then the population of some small towns. With that, and other aspects of the system...even if you could bring this to trial, it would take YEARS. And believe me, people will have long lost interest in the truth or justice before then. They'll probably be occupying themselves with the latest gossip of which star is screwing who, or some insipid reality show or whatever's come along to replace them. But in the end, they'll stop paying attention long before anything gets done." Thaddeus said, as he organized the papers and handed them back to Danny. "But if this is all you have as evidence, I doubt it will even get there."

"...you underestimate me."

"Not really. Besides this hearsay, what else do you have? My words?" Thaddeus said. "No, unfortunately. A man must make sure his secrets are kept sometimes. You're not the only one capable of communication manipulation. When it was clear you wanted to talk at me for a bit, I activated certain bafflers that are concealed in the walls. Normally they're used to make sure people can't listen in on cell phones and whatnot, but it works for any communication device. Including any listening devices you may have on you. All you and I have said was only heard by us. So once again, all you have is hearsay. And I can handle hearsay. As you can see, I'm quite good with problems."

"...so maybe I should just stab you right now." Danny said.

"You won't." Thaddeus said. "Like you said kid. You did the talking. If you wanted me dead, you'd have done it by now. You haven't. I know why. It's just not in you."

Danny looked at Thaddeus Quisling, as his eyes briefly flashed green. Thaddeus ignored it, as he reached under his desk and took out a shot glass and some scotch, pouring some into said glass.

"Do you have anything else you wish to discuss, or have you wasted enough of my time today?"

"...you...really don't care, do you?" Danny said. "You forced a product through, and when it backfired in the worst of ways you sent in a bunch of people to clean it up and act like it didn't exist. People DIED. THOUSANDS of them."

"And people died in the Twin Towers. And in the Holocaust. And in the slave trade. The difference is that I didn't intend for anyone to die. I merely acted out of necessity when a problem arose. And I solved it. Simple as that." Thaddeus said.

Danny stared incredulously.

"...look kid, let me fill you in on something." Thaddeus said. "I'm not the abnormal one here. You are."

"...what?"

"I know your type. The hero, the savior, battling evil and righting wrongs. Standing up for the little guy. Give a hoot, don't pollute, and all that." Thaddeus said. "...you think people like you for it? They don't."

Danny stared again.

"People don't like heroes. They like ease. There's two kinds of people in the world, always have been. Those that lead and those that follow. Your kind just thinks they lead. What they really do is run up ahead of everyone and make a big spectacle of it. And people look at that, and see the path you walk, and they realize they could do that, hell they should be doing it...but they don't want to. It's too hard. Too much damn effort. You think they put you on pedestals because they want to look up at you. No. They do it because they want to make sure they can look ahead without seeing you leave them in the dust. Deep down, people hate you kid. You make them realize what they are. Small, nothing, and that way because in the end, they like it."

Thaddeus sipped at his scotch.

"It's people like me they really like. We lay down the roads they can walk on. Simple. Oh you can leave them, but why bother? That's what those stupid heroes are for. And they're a pain in the ass, with all their altruism and nobility, all their caring. Caring about others...so hard. Better to just care for yourself. And the easier we make it, the more they appreciate us for it." Thaddeus said. "You're an aberration, kid. A snarl in the system. People don't want truth and justice. They want things simple and they want their needs tended to. Like my product. And so many others. And as long as you do that, they'll just keep walking the path, and ignoring all others. That's the way the world works kid. It's why people like me were running it centuries before you were born, and will be doing so long after you die. We're the norm. You're the mistake."

Danny said nothing, as he kept staring.

"I got here by following that path. By learning how to fix my problems as I saw fit. You seem to act like I'm somehow divorced from humanity by my choices and viewpoints. But like I said kid. I am humanity. And you...you're just a failed experiment at something else. Just like those people in Romero."

And Thaddeus drank deeply from his scotch and put the glass back down.

As he said himself, he didn't consider himself a bad man.

But there was a reason that if you attempted to psychologically profile a corporation as you would a person, you came up with a psychopath.

"So kindly just leave and quit wasting my time."

And strangely...Danny chuckled.

"Quite the argument you make there." Danny said, as he reached out and took the papers back. "You know, considering all I've found out, with all the dead ends and diversions, I wasn't expecting much when I came in here. But you exceeded my expectations. Even with that old argument. But hey, the old are the best. You've got the world all figured out."

And with the papers tucked back into his coat, Danny reached out and took his sword.

"THIS world anyway."

And black mist began to leak from Danny's sword, and for the first time Thaddeus' eyes showed a flicker of concern.

"What are you doing?"

"Oh that's the thing. I've done my part." Danny said as he stood up, as the black mist began to increasingly pour from the blade, Thaddeus getting up out of his chair to get away from it. "I just had to present you with what you'd done, and see what you decided. And since you've made your decision, I now have to direct you to the proper personas to make your oh-so-truthful argument against."

"What are you doing! WHAT IS THAT!" Thaddeus yelled.

"Your failed experiment. Or rather, all the souls of the people your actions got killed. Normally they'd cross over to whatever they'd earned...but I'm a weird magnet of sorts. They were drawn to me for justice. And I said I'd get them it. One way or another." Danny said, as he looked at Thaddeus coldly. "Like I said, you've got THIS world all figured out. But there are other worlds beside that. And I walk in them as well."

And Danny turned to leave, as the room's temperature began to drop, and angry whispers and cries began to echo across it, as Thaddeus stared in horror at the essence coming from the Magnus.

"No wait! WAIT, WAIT!"

"Sorry. I'm not the one you need to talk to. But hey, you said it. You're humanity. You were just doing what comes natural to you." Danny called over his shoulder. "But they're not human any more. So I can't really say what comes natural to them. Me, I'm going to go and keep being my usual aberrant self."

"WAIT! NO! YOU CAN'T...NO! PLEASE!!!!" Thaddeus screamed, as the mist finished emerging from the Magnus, as the sword floated up and flew across the room through the doors as Danny crossed through as well.

And the doors slammed shut.

"I never did like being around during violent arguments." Danny said, and slid the sword back in its sheath.


They'd forgotten Danny, briefly, in their attempt to stop the A-Corps from slaughtering the survivors. By the time all the drama had gone down with that battle and the aftermath involving silencing electrical devices, they'd finally realized he might be in trouble himself.

But as they crossed the streets, and its mountains of corpses, they began to consider that maybe they were worried about Danny for the wrong reasons.

Valerie found him first, a sole standing figure among the legions of dead, his outfit ripped to shreds, his body covered in blood and worse, and his eyes staring straight ahead in a weird zen-ish focus, the gore-caked Magnus clutched in one hand.

"Danny?" Valerie asked.

And Danny came back to his senses, as he looked at Valerie, and the others coming up behind her (oh geez they were filming again, with a shoulder mounted mini-cam, Danny hated that process, he didn't like re-living past battles). Seeing their concern.

And also their fear.

Of him.

And that, as far as Danny was concerned, was the last straw. There would be a great deal of hard work ahead, attempting to trace the origins of this, when so much of the system was so screwed up, usually by the elements that caused things like this.

Danny didn't care.

It was one thing to fear the monsters.

But it was another for them to fear him because of them.

"...this will not stand."


And it hadn't, as Danny exited through the front doors of River Dynamics. He wasn't concerned with what he'd left behind. They'd wanted one thing, and Danny had given it to them. If they sought more...he'd deal with it.

Valerie was standing nearby, dressed in street clothes, waiting for him. He nodded to her as she stood up, and that was all the answer she needed for what had went down.

"You know, during the initial days of the Great Depression, a lot of businessmen, upon being confronted with their failings, threw themselves out a window." Valerie said.

"I think Mr. Quisling is wishing right about now he got off so easy." Danny replied, and walked off.


Ambition is human...

As Danny's ears caught something he thought he'd heard the last of, and he whirled around...as more Savages came. Some still remained. More souls he had to free. To bring justice to.

But then again...that was what he did.

The Absolute energy ignited anew on his sword.

"Let's get to work." Danny said, as his fellows pulled out their own weapons, the camera crashing down to the ground as the Savages approached.

And his sword slashed out.

Sometimes, though, the question is...what is human?

End file.

CLICK!


*Roll credits, as footage plays under it of the camera being kicked and knocked around, showing crazy flashes of Savages and the Ghost of a Chance crew battling them to Disturbed "Down With The Sickness"*


See you around.

Perhaps.