After the Snap
Cal Rankin is a young man from our world who wakes up in a body in the MCU undergoing Terrigenesis during the Snap. He must adjust to a new life, new powers, and a familiar world undergoing catastrophic change. Even his outworld knowledge is largely limited in this unexplored time. It will not be easy, but he is determined to use his knowledge and power to help people in these uncertain times. To become a hero.
Chapter 1
I woke up standing in darkness with screams surrounding me. A stone shell crumbled off me as it turned to sand. Suddenly I could see, and I almost wished I was back in the dark.
It was Armageddon on a Manhattan street.
Right in front of me a delivery truck crashed full speed into the parked sedan separating the street traffic from the pedestrians. The car was forced over the curb and onto the sidewalk. Some people moved, jumping out of the way. I was knocked off my feet by one of the fleeing crowd. I would have dodged but my eyes were locked on a young Asian guy that was dissolving into black dust as the car slammed through him, scattering his powdered remains.
The sound of tires squealing and metal crashing repeated up and down the street offering a percussive accompaniment to high-pitched shrieks of terror pulled me from my stupor. Surging to my feet I tried to comprehend what was happening.
As people all around crumbled to smoky powder I realized I had seen this before. In Avengers Infinity War.
It was the Snap.
It had to be. Though I had no idea what I was doing in a cinematic apocalypse.
I looked around for Samuel Jackson. He and Maria Hill were in the street catastrophe scene. Somehow this looked differ from what little I remembered from that part of the movie.
An older woman slammed into me as I looked around. She grabbed my arms and yelled my name. "Cal! Help m…"
She dusted right in my face. Throwing my arm over my nose and mouth, I tried not to inhale her. Shocked, I realized I recognized her. She was one of my mom's coworkers from Bellevue.
But my mom worked in Michigan. Why did I have memories of her as a surgeon in New York? Of growing up in Central Park West? But I could also remember my house in Oakland, outside of Detroit.
Questions about my duplicate memories were pushed out of my head when I finally grasped what else I was seeing around me. Why did everyone have weird shit floating over their heads?
Everywhere I looked people had small clouds of tiny symbols flowing around them. If I concentrated on any individual person the cloud expanded, and I was able to easily distinguish the contents. Some icons were familiar – police badges, firefighter helmets, red crosses emblazoned with different medical symbols, footballs, guns, pills, cannabis leaves, dollar signs, chef's hats, cars, trucks, and many more. Many of the symbols were not familiar but I instinctively grasped that they represented skill sets the various people possessed.
When a person dissolved, the icon cloud faded to nothing.
This time the screech of tires fast approaching jerked me out of my reverie, and I was able to dodge the oncoming cab as it jumped the curb and careened off the tangled knot of wrecked vehicles to my left.
That got me running. I hugged the building-side of the sidewalk to avoid any more out-of-control vehicles. That worked great for a short while – until a passenger jet crashed into the building a block in front of me.
The shockwave from the impact slammed me back. I bounced off a light pole and careened into an alley slamming me into the side of a dumpster. This took me out of the direct line of the debris shower when the fireball from the plane's fuel blossomed.
As I lay against the grungy bin stunned and deafened for an indeterminate length of time, a man landed almost on top of me.
I do not mean he was flung from the explosion or fell from the building. I mean he floated to a standing stop, his burned clothes settling around him like gravity had just regained its grasp on him. He turned and I saw it was Robb Stark.
I knew the actor had played someone in the Eternals, but I had not seen that movie. Apparently, his character could fly. He also had the densest cloud of icons I had yet seen. They almost covered him like a cloak. Unlike other people, Robb' cloud had three distinct colors of symbols – silver, like everyone else, blue, and some color I had no words for.
For some reason, possibly being delirious from a concussion, I reached out towards his icons mentally. It was like trying to focus on something far away. The symbols snapped towards me, encircling me, sinking into me.
I barely noticed the Young Wolf running away.
As the symbols absorbed, I felt energy rush through my body while knowledge flooded my mind. The feelings were overwhelming. I screamed. It was too much. I was overfull. Color, especially that unknown color, poured out of me in waves.
When the pain passed, I realized I was floating over the buildings, being buffeted like a leaf in the wind by the heat rising from the burning wreckage. I took control of my flight and landed on a roof down the block from the disaster.
I knew so much. Ikaris, the Eternals, Mesopotamia, India, Tenochtitlán, languages, strategy, tactics, close quarter and ranged combat, and mostly how to use his powers – super strength, speed, durability, regeneration, reflexes, flight, and energy vision. Powers that I now possessed, at least limited copies of them. I instinctively understood he was too powerful for me to duplicate in full.
I also knew where Ikaris was. I could track him. He was moving away on foot. Trying to keep the secret of the Eternals' existence, I assumed. But he was not my main concern. Trying to figure out why I was in the middle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how to get home was.
The interregnum, what I and my friends called the time after the Snap and before Endgame, was not a period that the movies or shows explored, at least not so far. All we really knew was that the Avengers moved to their Compound, which they probably did after Civil War. At the end of the five years Manhattan was much darker, but the skyline still stood. The Statue of Liberty had gained a small boat town anchored all around Liberty Island. Also, as one of my friends had pointed out, the Statue and her torch were still lit, which I thought said something about the spirit of the people left behind. In other parts of the country all we see is that Scott Lang's old neighborhood in San Francisco was overgrown and mostly deserted, while the storage place the van was kept had a live guard with working CCTV. Cassie's neighborhood seemed much more normal. It seemed that by the end of the interregnum, life went on, maybe slower and sadder, but still there.
But the beginning was only shown as chaos in a couple of clips. I had seen what was going on around me in the movies, so I was having trouble believing it was real. But the turmoil and confusion felt so different. The heat. The smell. And most horribly, the sounds. People were hurting and crying, screaming and dying down there.
Looking more closely, I saw most of the people rushing away from the burning building, but some were trying to help. The vehicles on the road were all stopped. Even those that could still run were stuck in the impassable snarl of accidents and debris. Several people were trying to get the wounded out of the wrecks before they erupted either from their own fuel or from the spreading conflagration from the downed airliner.
I realized they had the right idea. This was the MCU, home to superheroes and beings who used their skills and powers to help others. On a distant planet the most iconic of Marvel heroes had just been dusted, but his credo – with great power comes great responsibility – still rang true.
I had powers of my own now, and with them the ability to help the people around me. I could stand and do nothing. I had done so in the past. I might do so again in the future. But this moment was so awful for so many people that I chose to try and make a difference. Ripping the sleeve from my shirt I wrapped it around my face in a makeshift mask and dropped to the ground.
Near the edge of the blast a man was trying to pull open the bent door of a green SUV. In the back seat a child was crying and a woman in the front passenger seat was unconscious. The vehicle was sandwiched between an armored car and a bus. There was no one in the armored car, but a uniformed man was standing on its roof, a shotgun in his hands. The bus was still running, but the driver was in the street yelling at people to help him unstick the SUV from the bus's bumper.
"Shut up and help me get these people out of the car and then we'll deal with your bus," the tall, black man with short-cropped hair yelled at the bus driver. He had several military looking symbols in his silver cloud. I touched one and found it was small unit leadership. Others included parachute packing, logistics, driving a forklift, and first aid. I figured he was some sort of part-time military, probably reserve or national guard. He seemed to be experienced in disaster relief and organizing people and things for movement.
I realized I could copy his knowledge and skills by drawing in his icons. It was a very strange experience. There were some similar skills, such as small unit leadership and organization, that were shared between Ikaris and Sergeant First Class Vernon Cleary, NY ARNG. Rather than doubling the skill, I retained the higher skill with some added breadth to reflect different experiences and contexts.
Reaching the SUV, I pulled the front and rear doors off the passenger side.
"You should be able to get them out now," I said, interrupting the argument.
Both men stared at me.
"Let me see if I can get the bus unstuck," I continued. Looking closely, I saw the metal under the SUV's front bumper was locked on the bus's rear carriage. A quick flash of energy separated them. I tried to push the bus forward, but the back wall started to buckle under my hand. "I think you're going to have to move the bus forward yourself."
"Who the hell are you?" the bus driver yelled. He was a short, round man with puffy grey hair and a walrus moustache. "You one of them inyewmans?"
I realized he meant the inhumans. In the pre-Fox-deal MCU the producers did not have legal rights to use mutants in the shows, so they were positioning the inhumans to be the way powers spread to the larger population.
"Just move the damn bus!" SFC Cleary barked. Nodding at me, he made a quick examination of the presumed mother and daughter. "The girl's ok, but the woman has at least a head injury, possibly neck and spine as well. She needs a hospital."
"Bellevue's just down the street," a woman in scrubs said as she approached. "I'm a technician there. But there's no way an ambulance can make it through this shit." She waved her arm to indicate the chaos in the street.
I realized I knew where the hospital complex was, not from the knowledge copied from Cleary, but because my mom worked there, and I had almost grown up hanging around the various medical buildings. But I also remembered meeting my mother at the hospital in Oakland many times. The dual memories were confusing, so I ignored them for the moment to concentrate on the crisis at hand.
"I can fly her there," I offered. I was certain I could use the new memories to find the ER.
"I don't know if it is safe to move her. It could make her injuries worse," Cleary said with a low voice.
"And separating her from her daughter in this mess could be really bad," the med tech added.
"How about I move them both in the SUV? Maybe you can come with them to stay with the girl and make sure she doesn't get lost in the system?" I realized it was sexist of me to assume the woman would be willing to take care of the girl, but I figured if she worked at the hospital, she had the best chance of getting her to the right social worker or counselor.
"Me … fly?" she stammered.
"Safest way to travel," I quipped. When her face dropped and Cleary's tightened, I realized just how heartless and inappropriate a thing to say that was with a burning passenger jet and however many hundreds of casualties just down the street. "Shit. I'm really sorry."
"Can you do it?" the older man asked.
I knew how strong Ikaris was and thought what I was suggesting was well within my reduced capabilities.
I nodded, not trusting my mouth.
"You'll have to be careful and try to keep the movement as smooth as possible. I can try to pad her head and neck, but you don't want to jostle her any more than necessary." He looked at me seriously.
"Got it," I confirmed. The Med tech climbed into the back seat on the other side, the one with a door, and introduced herself to the kid in the car seat.
Once she was in, I rolled under the SUV and lifted slowly. Ikaris flew by manipulating gravity so there was no real feeling of acceleration as I moved. I moved up and over the surrounding buildings. Once I was high enough, I could see Bellevue on the shore of the East River. Two minutes later I was landing in front of the ER entrance.
Ambulances were stacked three deep, mostly because the driveways and roads were clogged with crashes and stopped cars. There was space on the sidewalk outside the entrance, so I settled there. Unsurprisingly a flying SUV attracted the attention of the ER personnel. Almost immediately we were surrounded by EMTs and security. As I rolled out from under the vehicle, the med-tech was pulling the little girl from the back of the car and giving a report on the mother to the medical people crowded around her.
"Once you have them out, I can move the SUV," I said to one of the policewomen near the entrance.
"Who the hell are you? You don't look like an Avenger," she said.
"I'm new," I replied. I relocated the SUV into a nearby parking lot. It was full, but I put the vehicle in a no parking spot. I figured its obvious damage would keep it safe from ticketing. When I got back to the ER entrance, I offered to fly an ambulance to the next call. I could ferry them out and back though only one or two at a time.
"It might even be worthwhile to load a few vehicles up with emergency gear and I can drop you off at a hot spot so you can at least do some first aid and triage for people that can't get to the hospital." I had dropped the good sergeant's skills and copied the paramedic that looked to have the most experience. The suggestion came from her skills.
It turned out that I had to be pretty close to a person to copy their skills and powers. I had two 'slots' for lack of a better term that I could use to hold these copies. That is, I could copy two people at the same time. But it was easy to reconnect to people I had copied before to access their skills at a distance. So, I could easily switch back to Cleary's planning and leadership skills if needed. I had no idea if there was a limit on the reconnection range. I was still able to connect to Ikaris and he was halfway across the island.
While at the ER, I connected to as many doctors and other medical specialists as were in my collection range – which I estimated to be around thirty yards – cycling through them to make the initial copy so I could reconnect as needed. I even copied the cop; in case I needed her legal knowledge later.
I knew "my" mother was supposed to be in this hospital, several floors up and in a different area, but just a few minutes away. Part of me felt like I should go and see that she was alright. But I was not sure anything good could come from my doing so. Either she would be there and I would have to try to fool her that I was her son. Or she might have been dusted in the Snap.
While I had this Cal's memories, they were not mine. I knew of the woman that had been central in his life but had never met her and had no emotional attachment to her. I did not know how this body would react if I found out she was gone. Intellectually I knew if she were gone, she would be back in five years. Emotions, though, are not all in the mind. I did not want to find out that something in my new brain could still cripple me with grief.
So, I chose to avoid either unpleasant possibility by not searching her out. I did send a text that I was alright but got no immediate response.
"What's your name?" the senior EMT asked, shaking me from my thoughts.
I hesitated. MCU heroes were not great at keeping their identities secret. Some did not even try. But I still thought such secrecy was a good idea if I could pull it off. "Call me Bob," I replied, not certain why I had picked that name.
"Ok, Bob. I'm Tracy Issacs – shift supervisor. We need to get out there, but the streets are too full to move. People are dying while we wait. I think both your ideas sound good, if you can easily and safely carry a full rig." She pointed to an ambulance.
"Only one way to find out," I said and rolled under it. While the vehicle was heavier than the SUV, it was still manageable. I floated it up six feet then nodded to the people watching.
"Right," said a man in scrubs. "We'll start mapping out calls and putting them in order." He rushed to a computer behind a counter in the ER.
"While they do that, we'll start loading rigs for field operations." Issacs motioned to several EMTs. "Our people who go with you will keep an eye out for hotspots. If they see one, then they'll radio back and you can take out one of the special units when you return. Got it?"
"Sounds good." I replied.
The doc came back out with the address for our first call. The Cal Rankin Air Ambulance Service was in business.
At the first stop I grabbed a few masks and latex gloves out of the ambulance. I needed something a little more effective than my torn sleeve. Not long after I was in scrubs with an EMT jacket, just to make people more comfortable.
It was a long day, filled with agonizing disappointments as too often people were dead by the time we got to them, or if the patient was alive, many of those around them might not be. Where there were multiple casualties, Issacs would have me bring out a field unit, staffed with extra medics and lots of gear.
It was never enough.
I knew the Snap had dusted half of all humans on the planet. There was nothing we could do about that, and I knew that they would return in five years. But that said nothing about the chaos left behind when those people disappeared. It looked like somewhere north of a third of all vehicles lost their drivers while in motion. That caused innumerable accidents. The same happened to helicopters and airplanes, trains and subways, boats and ships, bulldozers and cranes, forklifts and machinery operators, everyone – all in the middle of the workday. The numbers and scope of destruction varied with the different situations. But the result was a catastrophe the likes of which had never been seen in history.
I was not the only super responding in the city. A few times I saw a young woman flying through the air, sheathed in a coruscating corona of energy that flowed behind her like a comet's tail. I did not recognize her from the movies or shows but my new memories identified her as Glitter, an amateur internet model that had undergone Terrigenesis a few months ago. Since then, she had been all over the net with mid-air selfies and videos. She was never in range for me to read her symbols or copy her power.
One trip took us to Hell's Kitchen, where Daredevil was helping to locate victims trapped under rubble. It was unusual to see him exposed in the day and search and rescue was far from his normal activity of busting mobsters and ninjas. But this was an all-hands catastrophe.
The blind hero looked at me as I rolled out from under the ambulance. I noticed that he had two icon clouds – the common silver one and a separate blue one. I tried copying his clouds and was suddenly inundated with a deluge of sensory input – all save vision which did not change. Only his skill in managing the flood allowed me to keep my feet, though I did stagger from the overload.
"Are you alright?" His voice was deliberately gruff as he reached out a hand to steady me.
"Bob?" Jamie, one of the EMTs, turned to me.
"I'm ok," I said. "I can help with moving debris."
"You have to be really careful, or you can cause a shift or collapse that can crush the person in there," a policeman argued. "It might be better to wait for the Fire Department."
"No way a truck is going to get through this mess. Bob may be our best bet. We'll just have to talk him through it," Jamie responded.
"I can guide you," Daredevil growled. "He's twenty-seven inches down under four pieces of masonry stacked like …" The masked man held his hands like a crooked steeple.
I laid my palm on the pile and clicked my tongue, causing Murdock to jerk almost imperceptibly. Suddenly I could feel what he meant – the shape of the debris and how it was laid precariously on top of each other. Beneath it was a middle-aged man with a smoking habit.
"Can you hold the second piece steady while lifting off the top piece?" the masked man asked.
I repositioned myself, floating so I was almost upside down. In that position I could brace the keystone. Murdock's powers included an enhanced sense of placement and balance, not just for his own body but for other objects as well. It was one reason he was so effective with bouncing his batons. Once I was sure I had the masonry supported I was able to lift the topmost piece away. Two minutes, and a lot of admonitions for care from Jamie and the policeman, later the victim was uncovered.
By the time we had him in the wagon, the Devil was gone.
It was after nightfall when I ran into another super. As I was returning from another call while carrying an ambulance, I spotted a young man, large with slate grey hair pulled back in a low tail, lifting vehicles on the street and moving them to the sides, clearing a single lane towards the hospital.
After dropping off the rig, I flew out to meet him. He stopped at my approach, watching me.
"Hi," I started. I did not recognize him from any of the movies or shows. "Doing a little street cleaning?"
"It seemed like the most effective use of my time and capabilities. Opening a route to and from the hospital that is." His voice was a rich, low baritone. He had a slight but noticeable accent.
He also had two icon clouds – silver and gold. I had not seen a gold one before. I tried copying it. Instead of occupying one of my two regular 'slots', this man's golden symbols flooded into one of a new set of five smaller, deeper special 'slots'. I got a copy of his powers, but not his knowledge or skills. He was strong and tough, about half as much as the fraction of the Eternal's powers I had copied. These traits directly added onto those I got from Ikaris.
"You are helping with transporting the ambulances?" he asked, breaking my distracted state.
"I was but clearing these opens some new options. Maybe I can help." I quickly communicated my location and plan to Issacs on the radio she had given me.
"I am Alaris of New Attilan. I am an exchange student at Empire State. That is where I started clearing the street."
I remembered that Attilan was the city of the inhumans on the Moon. I was guessing that New Attilan was wherever the Royal family had established their new home. Exchange students seemed to imply a more normalized level of diplomatic connections than was mentioned in the shows.
"Hi. I'm going by Bob to maintain my anonymity at the moment."
"Why do you wish for anonymity?" Alaris asked. "Our people have a long history of hiding but the Royals have said that time is over."
He seemed to be assuming I was a fellow inhuman. He might even be right. I had a memory of walking down the street this morning, popping a fish oil pill, and being engulfed in rock, right before things went black. That fit with what the Agents of SHIELD had shown for Terrigenesis during the inhuman emergence.
"I don't know what is going on with me. So, I want to keep my identity secret and my options open until I can figure that out," I offered.
Human or inhuman was the simplest of the questions I had in front of me. Who was I? Why did I have different personal memories? Why was I in the MCU? How could I get home? And if I could not, what was I going to do?